Network Programming in Elixir and Erlang

Adding Guarantees

As you learned at the beginning of this chapter, UDP lacks most guarantees that TCP provides. With UDP, you don’t know if packets will be delivered in the right order or delivered at all. Let’s quickly go over some strategies and patterns to add guarantees to UDP. These strategies will enable you to tackle some or all of the following situations:

• Out-of-order packets
• Missing packets
• Data that needs to be split into multiple packets

We won’t do this for our metric-collecting application, but you’ll need to know how to deal with these things if you’re working on an app that uses UDP.

As you’ll see, the number of strategies you need to have in your tool belt is not large. There’s only a handful of techniques to know. Plus, those techniques ...