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Daniel Azuma
Daniel Azuma

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Docker and OTP: Friends or Foes? (ElixirConf 2018)

On Sept 7, 2018, I spoke on "Docker and OTP: Friends or Foes?" at ElixirConf in Bellevue, WA. The talk discussed ideas for making OTP applications work together with container-based deployments.

As a community, we sometimes believe that OTP and containers/cloud are incompatible, and we too often conclude that we must choose one over the other. I argued that we should instead look for creative ways to combine the strengths of the two platforms. As an example, I demonstrated an online real-time game, written using Elixir/Phoenix, that uses process migration to survive container-based updates.

Talk resources

Code and libraries used in the talk

Other libraries of interest

  • An alternate library that could be used for process migration is Swarm, which can be found on Github at https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm.

  • Lasp is a collection of libraries for building large distributed systems in Erlang/Elixir. It includes a replacement for distributed Erlang, as well as implementations for global registries, CRDTs, and more. Information is available at https://lasp-lang.org.

Links and articles

I also intend to write a few posts myself covering some of this material in a bit more detail, so watch this space in the future.

Thanks

Thanks to Ben, Kyle, and Greg for joining me in writing the original Tanx app… has it really been three years?? Thanks to Google for sponsoring my appearance at ElixirConf this year, and to the Elixir team at Google for helpful feedback on my talk and demo.

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