Hello guys! I was reading the concurrency part of https://learnyousomeerlang.com/contents and I'm having trouble figuring how I'd connect the nodes. Suppose I have 3 nodes, how can each one of them know the name of the other two? Do I need to manually put their names or can I automate by storing their names somewhere?
#Handling a mesh of Erlang nodes
hot agate
wind latch
You name them when you start them
hot agate
Yes
wind latch
You can either have some automated cluster formation system or you can just connect by name
There's lots of options
hot agate
Is storing the names in a db table a good idea?
Like so:
Node 1 turns on, gets its name using node() and stores its name on the table. Sees there is no other node in the table and waits
Node 2 turns on, gets its name using node() and stores its name on the table. Sees node 1 name on the table and connects to it
wind latch
It's hard to say without knowing anything about your infrastructure
hot agate
Imagine the project is on fly and each node is a server in a region
wind latch
You would probably use DNS for that
Can see how the Elixir peeps tend to do it here
hot agate
I think I got it
It basically scans all nodes in the same DNS
Now I just need to understand this elixir code
At least if I figure it out I'll (probably) make it a library
(Along with the PostHog library I'll make one day)
wind latch
hot agate
If I got it right, the DNSCluster is an actor