[erlang-questions] Best practices for distributing an application over erlang?

[Gregory Haskins]

On 2/17/11 1:53 PM, Scott Lystig Fritchie wrote:
> Gregory Haskins <gregory.haskins@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> gh> Long story short(er): I suspect I am just making all of this harder
> gh> than it needs to be, and there must be a ton of you who are just
> gh> doing similar operations all the time.
> 
> Er, it seems to me that you are mixing together two problems:
> 
>     1. managing application bugfixes & upgrades
>     2. managing distributed application state
> 
> Having a whiz-bang way to manage the BEAM files required to do #1 is
> usually done by copying the new BEAM files to all the places that they
> need to be, then using a. load a module at a time (usually via the
> console, for small patches), b. OTP app upgrade (cool but tricky to
> coordinate, depending on the app), or c. rolling node stop & restart.
> 
> There are other ways to do it, as you were exploring, but they aren't
> the sort of things that I'm aware of many (any?) people using in
> production.  (Aside from diskless/stateless embedded systems.)  Or I'm
> completely misunderstanding your question....
> 

Thanks for the detailed reply, Scott.  I was afraid of your answer, but
I started putting together a prototype to address this apparent
shortcoming.  I call it "EDist", short for erlang-distribution.  If
anyone is curious, I have the code up on github:

https://github.com/ghaskins/edist

Ill update the wiki with better notes on what it does today and what I
want it to do in the future.  Note that it is still very much in a
prototype form, and I fully expect that the protocol ABI will change
before I get to "1.0".

Patches welcome, of course.

Kind Regards,
-Greg



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