Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Day 3: Distribution

Everything we’ve done so far has been on a single computer, but one of the actor model’s primary benefits compared to the models we’ve seen so far is that it supports distribution—sending a message to an actor on another machine is just as easy as sending it to one running locally.

Before talking about distribution, however, we’ll take a quick look at one of the most powerful reasons for using Elixir—the OTP library.

OTP

Over the previous two days, we built everything by hand in “raw” Elixir. This is a great way to understand what’s going on under the hood, but it would be both tedious and error prone if we had to write every worker and every supervisor from scratch every time. You won’t be surprised ...