Distributed computing with Elixir

Now that we've had our obligatory introduction to distributed computing and networking, we can start to see how and what Elixir and OTP bring to the table for creating distributed applications. Again, Elixir and OTP won't solve the problems we've mentioned, but the design around Elixir and OTP will put us in a really good position for handling failures in our applications and systems.

OTP nodes

So far, I've used the term node pretty loosely. Certainly, nodes have many meanings in certain contexts. In computing, node could refer to an element in a tree, a graph, a network, a server, and so on. In terms of OTP, a node refers to an Erlang VM. There can be as many OTP nodes on a single computer as allowed by the resources of the machine. OTP nodes can be hosted across several machines in the same network. OTP nodes can even be geographically distributed, although it's not recommended.

The choices of how to distribute OTP nodes will usually be a choice of the application...