Erlang clusters

Question

I\'m trying to implement a cluster using Erlang as the glue that holds it all together. I like the idea that it creates a fully connected graph of nodes, but upon reading differ

Answer 1

1) yes. they talk to each other

2) 3) and 4) Generally speaking, when building a scalable and fault tolerant system, you would want, or more over, need to divide the work load to different "regions" or "clusters". Supervisor/Worker model has this envisioned thus the topology. What you need is a few processes coordinating work between clusters and all workers within one single cluster will talk to each other to balance out within group.

As you can see, with this topology, the "limitation" is not really a limitation as long as you divide your tasks carefully and in a balanced fashion. Personally, I believe a tree like structure for supervisor processes is not avoidable in large scale systems, and this is the practice I'm following. Reasons are vary but boils down to scalability, fault tolerance as fall back policy implementation, maintenance need and portability of the clusters.

So in conclusion,

2) use a tree-like topology for your supervisors. let workers explicitly connect to each other and talk within their own domain with the supervisors.

3) while this is the native designed environment, as I presume, I'm pretty sure a supervisor can talk to a worker on a different machine. I would not suggest this as fault tolerance can be hell in remote worker scenario.

4) you should never let a node be part of two different cluster at the same moment. You can switch it from one cluster to another though.