Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Two Models for Distribution

In this book we’ll talk about two main models of distribution.

Distributed Erlang

In distributed Erlang, programs are written to run on Erlang nodes. A node is a self-contained Erlang system containing a complete virtual machine with its own address space and own set of processes.

We can spawn a process on any node, and all the message passing and error handling primitives we talked about in previous chapters work as in the single node case.

Distributed Erlang applications run in a trusted environment—since any node can perform any operation on any other Erlang node, a high degree of trust is involved. Typically distributed Erlang applications will be run on clusters on the same LAN and behind a firewall, though ...