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What is the use case for erlang given the current container technology and cloud providers? I mean many problems that erlang solved (and beautifully did it) can be dealt with docker and kubernetes

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The Docker chapter does mention similar things, and José Valim recently wrote the following blog post on this: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2019/10/kubernetes-and-the-...

In a nutshell, docker and k8s are to OTP what region failover is to k8s tech. They operate on different layers of abstraction and impact distinct components.

OTP allows handling partial failures WITHIN an instance, something K8s can’t help with.

I agree that some of the problems that OTP solves can now be taken over by Docker/K8s if you modify your architecture a bit. I.e. if you only have a few processes running on BEAM it's likely you could replace them by a few containers with a supervisor that restarts containers with errors, though you would have to start thinking about how they communicate (HTTP?) and some other things. It wouldn't scale to the same extent either (you don't want 1000s of containers on a single node) and Erlang provides some other benefits as well (e.g. single interface to manage all your processes, consistency if all your services are in Erlang, efficient threading). I would say that the main use case is when the model of using 1000s+ of processes helps you build an easy to understand architecture, which can be in messaging, streaming, gaming, or other applications with many simultaneous users/clients.

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