I’m looking for some feedback/validation on a deployment setup. It’s a few months out still, just asking early.

My main app is a mini monolith. It’s a relatively small e-commerce web app with an admin area and some other features all contained within the same Application (not an umbrella). Everything is LiveView so there is no web API involved (thanks LiveView, ya da best <3). Apart from that, there is a separate tiny Application that handles image processing. It’s developed as a separate app for two reasons: a) The Security considerations that come with running libvips as BEAM NIFs, and b) I want to be able to run a copy of it locally as we do a bunch of image experiments that don’t need to run in the cloud.

My original thought was to have a little web server for the image processor and communicate with it that way. Then I remembered: “Oh right, BEAM. I can just run the two apps on separate nodes and connect them, right?”. After doing some reading and some light experiments, it seems that I would want to use libcluster to have the two apps running on different nodes find each other. I can then communicate between the two with plain ol’ message passing. Does this make sense? Am I on the right track?

Sorry if this is all coming off as incredibly obvious—I have absolutely no experience with distributed Elixir and while it seems right based on reading and trying stuff out, I just wanted to say it “out loud” to someone since I’m working solo here. My brain is still very much stuck in the ways of Rails when it comes to deployments.

I’m not looking for any how-to answers or anything, I just feedback as to if I’m on the right track and if there is anything I’m not considering and and maybe some links to some resources to RTF I do know where the official docs are which is what I’ve been reading.

Thanks!