Designing Elixir Systems With OTP

Build Your Optional Server

One of the trickiest parts of learning a concurrency-based language like Elixir is understanding when to use processes at all. Here’s a little guidance. Consider processes when these use cases show up:

• Sharing state across processes

• Presenting a uniform API for external services such as databases or communications

• Managing side effects such as logging or file I/O

• Monitoring system-wide resources or performance metrics

• Isolating critical services from failure

This short list is not exhaustive, but it should give you a sense for the types of things that should prompt you to think about a boundary. In short, our boundary is an optional layer of impure integration code that make the core fast, robust, and reliable.

For ...