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by ihuk 906 days ago
You don't achieve fault tolerance solely by using Erlang. Erlang does not inherently 'achieve fault tolerance.' Instead, you make your system fault-tolerant through deliberate engineering. While Erlang provides tools and design guidelines, the responsibility for achieving fault tolerance ultimately lies with you. Source: I implemented and operated a large Erlang system for approximately 3 years.
3 comments

This is exactly why they're asking for example projects...
that's always true. i think the author is interested in code examples of such. and unlike many other frameworks/tools, erlang provides a great pit-of-success for implementing fault tolerance - e.g if you follow common/best practices - you'll achieve a fairly good fault tolerance.
The big benefit in my experience was that I could have a program with real users, that did have errors (from me being new to Elixir and not knowing better) and still not experiencing downtime.

Instead, CPU or Memory would increase over time, hit the VM limit, kill and restart.

So later when I noticed this, I could debug and fix it without simultaneously fighting a prod incident.