Build Stuff'14

Yale Professor Alan Perlis once wrote, “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”

To really appreciate the power of the actor model, no matter if you are using Go, Rust, AKKA or Erlang, you need to learn to think concurrently. Erlang has for decades been leading the way in concurrent thinking and developers from different communities abd backgrounds have a lot to learn from its approach.

This talk illustrates by example how embracing the Erlang way of thinking about problems leads to scalable and fault-tolerant designs. It will describe three ways of clustering Erlang nodes within the server side domain, describing how these systems have evolved as the concurrency model and the underlying hardware got more powerful.

Through these case studies, we will describe how Erlang, and more specifically, concurrency was done in 1995 when the limit of processes was 30,000, with an evolution as to how concurrency is used and applied today, when the limit of simultaneous processes in in the magnitude of millions per virtual machine.

In this talk we present Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang - an extension of distributed Erlang functional programming language for reliable scalability. The work is a part of the RELEASE project that aims to improve the scalability of Erlang programming language. We start by providing an overview of the RELEASE project and discussing distributed Erlang limitations. Then we introduce SD Erlang, its design, motivation, and the main two components, i.e. scalable groups and semi-explicit placement. The scalable groups (s_groups) enable scaling the network of Erlang nodes by eliminating transitive connections, i.e. a node may belong to multiple s_groups where each s_group node has transitive connections with the nodes from the same s_groups and non-transitive connections with other nodes. The semi-explicit placement enables to spawn processes on nodes either in a particular s_group, or with particular attributes (e.g. available hardware or software), or with certain parameters (e.g. least load). We’ll also cover the results of the preliminary validation, and SD Erlang operational semantics and its verification. We conclude the talk by providing a brief overview of the ongoing work and future plans.