Designing Elixir Systems With OTP

Chapter 8 Summon Your Workers

At last we’ve come to the “W” in the sentence “Do fun things with big, loud worker-bees.” “W” stands for workers. A worker is process machinery that lets us divide labor for reliability, performance, or scalability. The following figure tells the story:

Workers are various constructs that provide concurrency. Worker code lives in the boundary with the rest of our process machinery. The worker layer exists to manage concurrency using a variety of tools: naked processes, connection pools, tasks, and other dependencies.

The worker layer is not exactly the lifecycle layer because it lives outside of the OTP policy ...