Reliabilty with Erlang

Steve Vinoski's announces his latest column...

My latest column, Reliability with Erlang, first describes some of the problems that highly-reliable systems face, and then explains some of Erlang’s core primitives that provide a solid foundation for reliable systems...

BTW, I can’t recommend enough that you pick up a copy of Joe Armstrong’s Programming Erlang. It’s a truly excellent book that has deeply and positively affected the way I think about designing, building, and implementing software systems. As I mentioned in my columns, my only disappointment with Erlang is that I didn’t discover it 10 years ago when it was first open-sourced, as it could have saved me a ton of time and trouble in my middleware development efforts over the years.

From the column itself...

Layered on top of the Erlang language is a framework called the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which uses these features to help enable reliable systems. Despite the word “telecom” in its name, OTP is a general-purpose framework that’s useful for applications in a variety of domains.

I want to make it clear that Erlang and OTP aren’t magical — they won’t automatically make your software extremely reliable. Creating reliable systems with Erlang/OTP still requires knowledge, experience, solid code, thorough testing, and general attention to detail. Nevertheless, because the language was designed with reliability as a foremost concern, the combination of Erlang and OTP definitely has advantages over other common languages when it comes to reliable systems...

If you develop enterprise-integration or middleware applications that require high reliability, I’ll offer the same advice I gave last time: go get yourself a copy of Joe Armstrong’s book, Programming Erlang.1 This book is very readable and is suitable for both beginners and experts alike. It will open your eyes to a better way of building reliable software.