[emluque]

Thank you for your answer. It has been very enlightening.

Part of the problem I had with the videos had to do with the examples they were using (a shopping cart that stores data on process memory rather than an external db seems a little risky to me).

I will investigate Erlang Clusters. Again, thank you for your answer.

[abrookewood]

The idea with this is that you were only storing the state (shopping cart contents) up until the point that the user was ready to place the order (at which point it was written to disk). Prior to this point, state is stored in an in-memory database that is clustered among all of the running nodes. So yes, there is a risk that you could lose state, but only if all nodes died at the same time. Otherwise, the nodes jsut recover and re-synch the state.