BEAM doesn't do everything containers or a container orchestration system can, but in view of my relatively short time as a regular Erlang programmer (definitely less than 10 years), the spirit of tidepod's point accords with my experience (with a weaker interpretation of his term "node clustering"). BEAM and OTP don't do automatic load distribution between nodes, but can be fashioned to do so easily with application support.

We never used pool. The nodes were mapped onto heterogenous machines sharing the host with a 3rd-party daemon. It's configuration changes even took place through a module update hook written in Erlang itself. We both deployed new code and distributed work "manually" across them entirely on OTP.

[NOTE] It it surprising, or was to me, that there are problems with having a fairly small number of nodes fully connected. I'm lucky enough to have avoided learning this the hard way, but imagine this could serve as a painful backbone to an "Erlang deployment war story".