[erlang-questions] Erlang and cloud computing

[Michael Truog]

On 01/30/2012 07:40 AM, Yves S. Garret wrote:
>
>    I have a curiosity question.  Is Erlang being used somehow in the field of cloud computing?  The idea of splitting up a task and then processing it in pieces in parallel seems right up Erlang's alley.
>
>    I have looked at Windows Azure, but they mostly use .NET languages, are there services where you can have a cloud computing environment and use Erlang to do the application development?  What has been your experience if you have used Erlang in cloud computing?
>

There is a public/private cloud computing framework that I have been working on for a few years called CloudI (http://cloudi.org).  CloudI helps take advantage of Erlang's actor model, extending it into C/C++, Java, Python, and Ruby, to provide fault tolerance and scalability.  Erlang is very applicable to cloud computing, since it provides real fault-tolerance... while there are attempts to provide fault-tolerance within JVM languages, it is limited by their single heap garbage collection strategy (which also helps to limit scalability).  So, it is very beneficial to have solid supervision tree functionality to manage fault-tolerance within the Erlang language.  Other cloud computing source code and services are unable to provide granular fault-tolerance... they focus on large system redundancy, like with the AWS zones or avoid an AWS zone outage.  With CloudI, it is much simpler to test without a public deployment, so you can make architectural decisions without getting
locked into a particular cloud computing service and that allows you to focus on lower-level fault-tolerance/scalability concerns.

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