[toast0]

> And is there anything in OTP that would help me elect a leader or do I still have to implement that myself?

global:register/3 may be helpful. I haven't used it, so no direct experience. I think you would need to provide the resolution function for when a cluster merges and the name is registered on both partitions, and the logic to register a potential leader if there is none.

From experience with other parts of global, you'll want to be careful and test what happens on your system if a thousand nodes across several locations all try to join/register at once. Especially if one or several of those nodes are running really slow because of hardware issues.

I think some of this might be covered in distributed OTP applications with takeover[1], but where I worked with Erlang, we certainly weren't applying OTP applications as the OTP team intended, I think as a result of most of the team, including all of early server engineers learning Erlang on the job.

[1] https://learnyousomeerlang.com/distributed-otp-applications