This is pretty cool. The rate limiter & circuit breaker use cases is something I didn’t think about before.
hubertlepicki
keathley
Not to take away from this library which looks pretty reasonable on its own, but I don’t think you actually want to do either of those things. In a large enough cluster different servers may have different views of the external service. You don’t want to blow circuits for otherwise healthy nodes just because one unhealthy node says that their circuit is blown. Along with those reasons I would be very hesitant to add that much complexity into the critical path of the request. Rate limiting is much better done by leveraging Little’s Law and increasing or decreasing the number of outbound “connections” dynamically.
Another minor quibble with the post but this statement is inaccurate and I think potentially misleading:
Conflict-resolution is the central feature of CRDTs. In fact, CRDTs are guaranteed to converge globally , meaning that the data will (eventually) be the same at every replica.
CRDTs don’t actually guarantee this. This is a guarantee that the replication protocol has to provide. Even if you assume that there’s a replication protocol underneath your CRDT that manages this correctly it’s only a valid statement if you add the sentence, “as long as there are no network partitions”. The cold hard reality of “eventually consistent systems” (meaning inconsistent systems) is that “eventually” is only theoretical. There’s always a likelihood that your system never converges. Not stating this explicitly has the potential to grossly mislead people.
Crowdhailer
Creator of Raxx
Introducing GenBrowser
Introducing GenBrowser
Elixir (and erlang) are built on processes, which makes concurrency and distribution simpler. What if the processes model extended beyond the server, to the clients of a web application?
GenBrowser enables browsers to send and receive messages like an Elixir process. This simplifies communication and allows the actor model to be applied to reasoning about the whole client-server system.
derekkraan
Hi @keathley, I thought the word “eventually” was enough to cover network partitions, but I’ve adjusted the wording to make it more explicit. I’ve also added some text about anti-entropy algorithms for completeness.
No comment on whether it’s actually a good idea to build some of these things, the goal of this blog post is mostly to get people thinking about different ways they might be able to use the library. Feel free to post in the comments on the blog post itself though.
fatboypunk
nico_amsterdam
I read Erlang/Elixir between the lines, Alan Kay’s OOP:
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-forgotten-history-of-oop-88d71b9b2d9f
reminds me of: Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay
Qqwy
TypeCheck Core Team
We’ve just published a guide on how to use Planga in your Elixir/Phoenix-application:
minhajuddin
OvermindDL1
Hmm that article states that Cachex is only a local cache but it supports distributed caching as well:
It’s not super featureful, like I don’t know if it’s pluggable, but it supports cross BEAM node cache storage via sharding, so Nebulex is more capable if you have an external store.
I wonder how they benchmark, I’d love to see both tested with their full feature sets. ^.^