Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP

Chapter 13. Distributed Architectures

Previous chapters have described the implementation of a single, simple node. A node is the smallest executable standalone unit consisting of a running instance of the Erlang runtime system. In this chapter we start to show how to expand from single nodes to distributed systems comprising multiple nodes. We try to help you figure out how to achieve availability, scalability, and consistency across these nodes. These qualities go hand in hand with reliability, which ensures that your system behaves correctly even under abnormal circumstances such as failure or extreme load.

Each node consists of a number of loosely coupled OTP applications, defined in its OTP release file. An OTP release determines the services the node provides and tasks it is capable of handling. Nodes that share a release file contain the same set of OTP applications and are considered to be nodes of the same type.

Nodes of one type can interact in a cluster with other node types to provide the system’s end-to-end functionality. An Erlang system can comprise just one standalone node, but more typically consists of multiple nodes grouped in one or more clusters.

Clusters are needed for a variety of reasons. You might be implementing a microservices architecture, where each cluster of nodes provides a set of services. Or you might use clusters for scalability, sharding across identical clusters to increase computing power and availability. When dealing with distributed Erlang ...