Part 2. Fault tolerance, supervision, and distribution

We’ve come to the area where most languages and platforms struggle to do well: fault tolerance and distribution. In chapter 5, you’ll learn about the primitives that the Erlang VM provides to detect when processes crash.

Then you’ll learn about the second OTP behavior, Supervisor, and how to manage hierarchies of processes and automatically take action when a process crashes. Chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to building a full-featured worker-pool application that uses GenServers and Supervisors.

Chapters 8 and 9 explore distribution through the lens of load balancing and fault tolerance. By the end of those two chapters, you’ll have built a distributed load tester: a distributed, fault-tolerant Chuck Norris jokes service. More important, you’ll have a firm grasp of how to use OTP effectively.