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Comment by ericlewis | Hacker News Reader

So you’re saying erlang can automatically distribute async tasks across nodes? Probably too much to comment, but how or where can I learn more about this way of thinking of it?

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Not automatically, but if you connect multiple nodes into a cluster, when you spawn a process you can select which node it will be spawned on. Additionally, once the nodes and processes are running you can send messages across nodes to different processes using the same method you use for processes on a single node. [0] Shows an example of communication across nodes, as well as some preliminary material that would be helpful if you don't know Erlang.

I mostly learned Erlang from Joe Armstrong's book [1], though the first edition. I'm confident the second edition is as good as the first. Learn You Some Erlang [2] is a great free (also available for purchase, but free online) book.

[0] https://erlang.org/doc/getting_started/conc_prog.html

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang2/programming-erlang-2nd...

[2] https://learnyousomeerlang.com/

I’m not at home and don’t recall the library name off the top of my head (maybe libcluster?), but I recently inherited an Elixir project where the nodes were run in a k8s cluster and they automatically joined up. I was a little skeptical at first, having always manually managed that before, but... it’s buttery smooth!

We are doing this right now at scale for healthcare integration. My team lead gave a keynote on it at CodeBEAM this week!

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