My suggestion is always, only use distributed erlang if it is for a control plane.
If you are talking between services there is a lot to say about being able to reuse existing infrastructure for shit like load balancing (like http and recently grpc, which I’d suggest personally, has more support).
Distributed Erlang gives you a single non-multiplexed connection between each node, so workloads that you’d expect to work mostly fine if you were doing http, like with large payloads, will fall apart.
There is work on improving distributed Erlang (chunking large messages was recently added and I guess will be in OTP-22) and there is partisan (http://partisan.cloud/) for a high performance distributed Erlang. But for what it sounds like you are building you will likely have success using http or grpc.
