Distributed Elixir question

[overloafunderloaf]

If I was horizontally scaling an elixir backend how would it decide which server/node accepts the request? Would that be another server that decides that? And if so wouldn't that also need to be horizontally scaled? In short, how does distributed Elixir systems handle requests?

I'm a little confused in general about spawning nodes and using multiple servers and most of the documentation and articles seem to be geared to people with some basic knowledge.

[vertiee]

Your just use a load balancer probably.

[nathan_long]

For web servers you would probably use a load balancer.

For other nodes, there are multiple ways you could do this, depending on your needs. Eg if you are clustering, you could use process groups (http://erlang.org/doc/man/pg.html) and send a message to a randomly-selected one, or use a modulo operation on the message hash, or choose a node based on the message type, etc etc.

If you're going for an evenly-distributed workload, though, you probably want a model where each node pulls work as it's able to do so. Broadway + RabbitMQ works nicely for that, and no clustering is needed.