/offtopic Has anyone resurrected Riak from the ashes of Basho? That tech was too good. But I wouldn’t bet my job on using it for critical infrastructure components anymore. Not at least without a strong open source community behind it.
CptnKirk
entone
CptnKirk
I heard that Bet365 bought it and open sourced everything. And that the UK NHS was also contributing. But that’s the last I’ve heard. There’s no evangelism, no community forum, nobody offering support, no release schedule, no product/release vision. I’d feel better about your average Apache project at this point. If you already have Riak in-house, that’s a different matter. But this makes me nervous. It could be that my info is outdated though.
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michalmuskala
I’m not sure about other things, but support for riak is offered by Erlang Solutions.
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andre1sk
dom
There’s several implementations of leader election, but none of them is very clean or easy to use really. At the end of the day Erlang was created for systems where net splits are very unlikely, and I think most users still use it under this assumption, or defer to an external system (typically PostgreSQL) to ensure consistency.
The “traditional” option has been gen_leader. It’s been around for many years, used in Riak, model checked, etc. so it should be good at this point, but you have to be careful to use the right branch 
https://twitter.com/potsdamnhacker/status/928483849394196480
https://github.com/abecciu/gen_leader_revival
There’s also a Locks library, which I believe was a refinement of the above. Not sure about production usage.
https://github.com/uwiger/locks
Riak worked on Ensemble too, but folded before it could become a solid library.
https://github.com/basho/riak_ensemble
More recently the RabbbitMQ folks announced a project to implement Raft. This is still WIP. It could be a great building block though, especially if it gets used in RabbitMQ which would give it much needed battle testing.
https://github.com/rabbitmq/ra
Putting aside leader election for a bit - Swarm recently got a quorum strategy which can help ensure a unique instance of a given registered process exists in the cluster. A big limitation though is you can’t resize the cluster easily.
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andre1sk
andre1sk
I think the killer app is basically gen stage producer that is internally powered by kafka like distributed replicated log but has no dependencies external to Erlang/Elixir ecosystem.
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CptnKirk
If it’s a remote system, what does it matter what it’s written in? As it is now, Elixir would benefit from great integrations into these products. Some exist. But they don’t seem to be super high quality at this point.
Never mind. I misread the whole concept of the OP.
A number of libs exist that try and expand upon the capabilities of Distributed Erlang. I’ll try and dig some up a bit later. One nice thing that external trackers provide, is that the heavyweight aspects of tracking are isolated to your external tracking cluster. For example, Zookeeper depends on super fast disk IOPS. Do you want this to be a requirement everywhere, or just for the Zookeeper deployments?
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andre1sk
? Given the number of network roundtrips needed for all the consensus protocols I don’t think disk IOPS play much role there
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