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by binary132 628 days ago
“Just spin up more cores on one machine” has a pretty low scale ceiling, don’t you think? What, 96 cores? Maybe a few more on ARM? What do you do when you need thousands or tens of thousands of cores?

Well, what I do is think of functions as services, and there are different ways to get that, but BEAM / OTP are surely among them.

1 comments

> What do you do when you need thousands or tens of thousands of cores?

I think most software won't need to scale that far. Did you run into any systems like that built on top of BEAM?

I’m just saying, erlang was built for telephony at scale, not for building some REST website. “You probably won’t need more than one big host for any given request” isn’t really a winning argument for scaled systems
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe "scale" in the original context meant developing a system with strong fault tolerance properties, so that if a node went down to ie a hardware failure, the system as a whole would keep working normally.

So, did you run into any systems that needed to scale to tens of thousands of cores for a reason inherent to the problem they were solving, and was built on top of BEAM?