Designing Elixir Systems With OTP

Know Your Tools

You are doubtlessly using Elixir partially because it provides an excellent foundation for concurrency. The worker layer is a concurrency management layer, and in this section, we’ll look at the different tools at your disposal to manage concurrency. We will start with some of the most basic ones.

Dependencies will allow us to simply include the work of others. Processes are Elixir concurrency primitives we can certainly lean on in a pinch, but normally we’ll be working at a higher level of abstraction. Tasks will allow us to do one-off jobs and still rely on the rich OTP library. Connection pooling libraries let us share long-running connections across processes. Finally, we can integrate into existing frameworks that provide ...