Elixir Cluster 101

One of the main super powers of Elixir (and other BEAM languages) is the built-in functionality for clustering nodes and communicating transparently across the cluster. Any distributed systems normally come with serious disclaimers. It’s very hard to get synchronized state across a cluster right, avoiding corrupted states during net splits or unreliable networks, dealing effectively with rolling deploys and mismatching versions of code. But that shouldn’t discourage us. There’s a wide range of use cases for distributed Elixir, also known as disterl (and a bunch of other things, we really need a consistent name for this). You just need something that matches a few basic criteria: It’s okay if some data is lost It’s okay if some data is incorrect As long as those criteria match, distributed Elixir, and distributed systems, are not actually that scary. Because it’s going to work most of the time, and for the use cases that match those criteria it’s frequently going to be a really good,…