Designing Elixir Systems With OTP

Summon Your Workers

This chapter presented the worker layer, the process machinery that manages concurrency apart from lifecycle policy. We framed the discussion in three parts: the reasons to adopt a worker layer, the tools we might use for doing so, and the implementation of worker concepts to build a scheduler.

First, we established three primary motivations for introducing a worker layer: concurrency, isolation and scalability. Concurrency is a focused issue that allows more than one task to happen at a time, often reducing latency or enabling a feature like a scheduler. Isolation improves system reliability by limiting the damage any single bug can do by crashing a process. Scalability is a broader architectural concern, allowing one program ...