Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14Distributed Programming

Writing distributed programs in Erlang is only a small step from writing concurrent programs. In distributed Erlang, we can spawn processes on remote nodes and machines. Having spawned a remote process, we’ll see that all the other primitives, send, receive, link, and so on, work transparently over a network in the same way as they worked on a single node.

In this chapter, we’ll introduce the libraries and Erlang primitives that we’ll use to write distributed Erlang programs. Distributed programs are programs that are designed to run on networks of computers and that can coordinate their activities only by message passing.

Here are some reasons why we might want to write distributed applications:

Performance ...