[chrismccord]

I've been working on the orchestrator side with Elixir and Phoenix, so happy to continue the discussion for curious minds. One of the coolest things we can do is things like this in Elixir - from any node we can reach out to a sqlite db across the planet:

OrgTracker.with_repo(org_id, fn ->

  repo.all(from sprite in "sprites", select: ...)

end)

That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code. Placements can be sticky so they pin to a machine so we don't have to suck down the db every start, but we also balance out the load and handle failover of durable processes automatically. Combined with litestream, the result is distributed sqlite with failover while treating it essentially like a locally reachable sqlite db. Yes there is the speed of light to contend with, but by sending the execution across the wire rather than individual queries, we only ever pay a single hop to reach the process/sqlite.

[randito]

(Disclaimer: Newbie checking but still curious).

Are you using libluster or Distributed Erlang to reach the clusters? Or just simple networking over the Fly network.

> That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code.

Is this similar to what you did with Flame? Or just a refinement of that idea.

[chrismccord]

We use dns_cluster, which ships with all phoenix apps. libcluster achieves the same, so whatever works. Ultimately dist erl just needs a way to reach the nodes and you call Node.connect/1 on a hostname and off to the races. It's similar to FLAME, in that the erlang VM allows sending functions over the wire as a regular transparently encoded/decoded datastructure, but in this case it's just simple built-in erlang erpc, ie `:erpc.call` underneath rather than FLAME where we are managing a pool of elastic nodes, then rpc'ing them.