Solving the right problem

[Ulf Wiger]

Re. 3, you should definitely look into using existing solutions for
HTTP/HTTPS load-balancing. This will work every bit as well with
Erlang/inets as with any other technology.

Re. 4, yes, and you're not limited to inets. Take a look e.g. at Cowboy [1]

Re. 5, well, your description is vague enough that it's hard to answer, but
you seem to be aiming for some form of SOA architecture. If you want to
proceed quickly with prototyping and MVPs, you could implement a component
architecture inside a single Erlang node and make some minimal preparations
for being able to later break them apart into a larger network of services.
A single Erlang node running on a decent cloud instance is likely to handle
a fairly large number of devices without breaking a sweat, unless your
applications are expected to be very computationally heavy.

This way, you can defer the many messy issues of going full SOA from the
beginning, and benefit from Erlang's outstanding "micro-SOA" capabilities.

[1] https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy

Den mån 4 nov. 2019 kl 13:10 skrev Marthin Laubscher <
marthin@REDACTED>:

> Hi everyone,
>
>
>
> Please pardon my long absences from this awesome (mature) community and my
> limited knowledge which is likely outdated as well. I’ve known since 1996
> when I was first told (in confidence by an Ericsson Radio Systems liaison)
> about Erlang that it would have to play a role when I eventually get to
> implementing the system I’ve been working on designing since 1991. That big
> day is drawing near, so now I’d like to reaffirm my high level
> understanding of what the language is suited for.
>
>
>
> I reckon the problem I’m looking to address is intrinsically concurrent
> and if I can design the solution just right I just might be able to avoid
> introducing sequential code and choke points to create an dynamic
> (learning, responsive to conditions) distributed server capable of using
> all or most of its resources for any mixture of trivial, simple, complex
> and massive service requests whether it’s coming from a few clients or
> billions of them. Essentially as illustrated in the diagram below:
>
>
>
>
>
> I’d like to ask your advice and check some assumptions if I may impose.
>
>
>
>    1. Is my conviction that Erlang (and OTP) is ideally if not best
>    suited to addressing this type of problem objectively justified or likely
>    based on loyalty and familiarity?
>    2. Is my aspiration to scale the same code from one server to
>    potentially hundreds of thousands of cores spread across the globe
>    hopelessly romantic or somewhere within the realm of possibility?
>    3. Assuming the network remains HTTP/HTTPS based, would Erlang’s inets
>    module allow the code accepting new requests to interact with and control
>    load balancing hardware to ensure each such request is served on the best
>    available server, or will I need custom load balancers of my own for that?
>    4. Still assuming HTTP/HTTPS will inets allow me to break up request
>    processing across multiple processes and threads based on incremental
>    scanning of the requests themselves?
>    5. Are there lessons from previous (or current) successes and/or
>    failures to achieve similar results to learn from available in the public
>    domain like maybe from ejabberd or Yaws?  (I’m not attempting to reinvent
>    any wheels or address a general purpose need like Yaws et al. Internet and
>    web protocols may be involved but I have a singular focus on delivering
>    user-specific perspectives of a single large dataset to a custom client
>    app.)
>
>
>
> Given my two additional objectives of eventually:-
>
>    1. ending up with a boringly simple system which elegantly
>    encapsulates all these complex requirements, and
>    2. open-sourcing the entire system once it’s beyond reach of those
>    with nefarious intentions,
>
> would anybody like to get involved in helping design and implement this
> project or even take the lead on it?
>
>
>
> Thank you in advance for your kind consideration.
>
>
>
> Warm regards,
>
>
>
> Marthin Laubscher
>
>
>
>
>
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