Simple examples of distributed systems in Elixir?

Hi, I’ve recently read about distribution from the Elixir in Action book, 3rd edition.

The below advice is from my understanding of that book.

You could delegate (compartmentalise specialised work) using process groups.

Here is the documentation for the :pg module.

You would thus have a set of nodes that the other nodes can know are is responsible for doing particular jobs.

You would also have processes that serve particular purposes registered at initialisation, they would have their own PIDs that would include the host addresses identifiable by remote nodes anyway, so you could forward requests to those processes even though they are on remote nodes using very similar messaging sending procedures.

You could forward requests to a request resolving process that would identify which process is in charge of what service, or even request the spawn of a process by a pool manager in order to service a given request.

You would want to use calls to do this, to receive confirmation that the request was successfully served. Here is the documentation for remote procedure calls.

This probably isn’t a whole lot of info, just pointing you in the right direction, I’d definitely consider giving chapters 10 - 12 from Elixir in Action a read.

Hey, have you checked the “Introduction to Mix” guide in the official documentation?
Although the name can be a bit misleading, this is the description of the guide:

In this guide, we will build a complete Elixir application, with its own supervision tree, configuration, tests, and more.

The application works as a distributed key-value store. We are going to organize key-value pairs into buckets and distribute those buckets across multiple nodes. We will also build a simple client that allows us to connect to any of those nodes and send requests

I think it might be helpful, it covers how nodes connect to each other using the configurations and shows some example of running code in a remote node and distributing work across nodes via sharding.

Overall the erlang runtime does no magic to help you and you still need to build your own mechanisms of distribution and load balancing in your application, but it provides all the building blocks you’ll need to do so.

I really need to get a copy of this book