[erlang-questions] Microservices vs. Erlang processes

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:

> This IMO is a rebranding of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
> moniker that was hijacked by software vendors and enterprise IT to use
> to sell non-SOA technology.
>

Indeed. They took Jack Daniels and rebottled it on Ardbeg 18yo bottles.
This is only going to work for so long.

The whole *crux* of SOA/MS is component isolation. To manage large complex
systems, you need to split them into distributed entities and make
communication between services asynchronous+resilient. This is exactly the
design where a system like Erlang excels.

The client I am working for uses Erlang as an orchestration service in
front of a large RabbitMQ cluster. Most microservices are written in
Node.js, python, ocaml, whatnot. And Erlang mediates between the services.
It is nice because a lot of the concurrency problems can be lifted into the
Erlang-world and handled there. While still keeping a boring sequential
program written in Python to do other things on the side. RabbitMQ allows
horizontal scaling and a common interface for messaging with a well-defined
protocol/driver interface.

Decoupling is the key to manage large complex infrastructure setups.


-- 
J.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20140708/c4148b09/attachment.htm>