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by bsaul 2222 days ago
Stateful servers seems like an atrocious point of failure nowadays (except if it's a DB server, or a persistent queue). And i barely see it anymore, now that everything seems to be running on containers or VM that are supposed to be destroyable at any time.

That's why the value of OTP seems to be less obvious at the moment (from the point of view of someone who doesn't use it). But there's surely something i'm missing.
2 comments
ch4s3 2221 days ago
> Stateful servers seems like an atrocious point of failure nowadays (except if it's a DB server, or a persistent queue)

I think that's the perception, but it isn't necessarily true. I work on an Elixir team that quite successfully runs a stateful server. The service is pretty stable and the stateful portion is never the source of problems. That's one anecdote, but if you look at servers for online games, they're often quite stateful and work rather well.

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toast0 2222 days ago
Decently built servers don't fail that often. If you're going to run a couple thousand servers, you'll want them to be bare metal, because VM overhead is real.

If your system is designed properly, it's not unreasonable to have a node out of service for a couple hours while it's repaired. Nodes which don't have database state can often wait until business hours to be repaired, if there are enough nodes that you can have a few down.

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