June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
494 pages
14h 7m
English
Content preview from Erlang ProgrammingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 11. Distributed Programming in Erlang
To write a fault-tolerant system, you need at least two computers[27] and you need to distribute your program across them. Distributed systems lie at the heart of modern computing. In server-side programming, it is the exception rather than the rule to see a single computer performing a task of any difficulty; instead, a number of computers (or processors) will together provide a robust, efficient, and scalable platform upon which applications can be built.
Erlang distribution is built into the language, and from the user’s point of view, it can be completely transparent: processes are accessed by a pid, and this may equally well refer to a process on the local computer or a process on a system on the other side of the world. In this chapter, we will look at the theory behind distributed systems and see how it is applied to Erlang-based systems.
Distributed Systems in Erlang
The essence of distributed systems is to provide in a transparent way a service of some kind through a number of computers, processors, or cores linked together by a network. A service can be specific, such as the storage provided by a distributed filesystem or database, or more general, as in a distributed operating system that provides all the facilities of a general-purpose OS across a network of computers. Distribution can be seen in tightly coupled parallel processors, but more clearly in the loosely coupled grids of e-science systems. Erlang provides distributed ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.