Programming Elixir 1.2

Chapter 16OTP: Servers

If you’ve been following Elixir or Erlang, you’ve probably come across OTP. It is often hyped as the answer to all high-availability distributed-application woes. It isn’t, but it certainly solves many problems that you’d otherwise need to solve yourself, including application discovery, failure detection and management, hot code swapping, and server structure.

First, the obligatory one-paragraph history. OTP stands for the Open Telecom Platform, but the full name is largely of historical interest and everyone just says OTP. It was initially used to build telephone exchanges and switches. But these devices have the same characteristics we want from any large online application, so OTP is now a general-purpose tool for ...