Building Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems with Erlang/OTP

Introduction

Erlang/OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a powerful framework for building fault-tolerant, distributed systems. With over 10 years of experience in this domain, I’ve seen firsthand how Erlang’s actor model and OTP principles can create highly reliable systems.

Key OTP Components

GenServer

The GenServer behavior is the foundation of most Erlang applications. It provides:

• State management
• Message handling
• Error recovery
• Hot code upgrades

Supervision Trees

OTP’s supervision strategy ensures system resilience:

• Automatic restart of failed processes
• Hierarchical process management
• Configurable restart strategies

Real-World Applications

In my work with 5Gencare, we built distributed IoT/AIoT backends using:

• Erlang/OTP for core services
• Mnesia for distributed databases
• Docker for containerization
• Prometheus for monitoring

Best Practices

1. Always use supervision trees for process management
2. Implement proper error handling with try-catch blocks
3. Use hot code upgrades for zero-downtime deployments
4. Monitor system health with tools like Prometheus

Conclusion

Erlang/OTP remains one of the most effective tools for building distributed, fault-tolerant systems. Its principles of “let it crash” and process isolation make it ideal for mission-critical applications.