How are you/your companies using Erlang?

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I’m sure I’m not the only person wondering where or how Erlang is being used out in the wild today.

Does it still have a stronghold in telephone networks? Is it being increasingly used in other applications? Where? How? :smiley:

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For the last few years I was honored to participate in various Erlang projects there were directions:

  • Mobile networking core
  • Services for betting
  • Blockchain
  • Messengers
  • Web services and microservices
  • Web sites
  • Banking
  • AI/Machine learning

I also heard that it’s pretty good to use in game servers - but did not participate :upside_down_face:.

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I’m using Erlang on a small commercial project, which is a reservation system interacting with some third-party services and providing HTTP interface for clients running in smartphones.

By “small” I mean there are only fewer than 10,000 users, the code of the backend is fewer than 10,000 lines and I am the only developer for both the server side and the client side.

This project was started at 2019. At first I wrote it in Node.js (and MySQL and Redis), which I had been using for 4 years in the company. But during the 2020, I rewrote the whole system in Erlang (and Mnesia). It was not easy. I had a job as a developer in daytime, so I had to do the rewriting at night. From January 2021, the server of this system is replaced by the new Erlang server.

Using Erlang doesn’t solve all the problems, some sneaky bugs hidden in the complex business logic can’t be avoided by any language. But Erlang is a good friend when you are facing those tricky situations. And writing in Erlang is just fun!

I will keep using Erlang in my projects.

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I work at a very large residential ISP in the US. As far as I know, we have no project using Erlang at the moment, although I’ve been trying to spread interest. We have projects in just about every other language, so I’m surprised someone hasn’t used Erlang for something. But I checked on our internal github and saw nothing.

I plan on rewriting one of my own Python programs in Erlang, though, mostly for my own education. It monitors allocated IP space for hijacked prefixes by other autonomous systems in BGP. We want to know quickly if some other provider is advertising our space. I’d like to rewrite this in Erlang and extend the functionality a bit, but I have a long way to go to be able to pull it off.

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I started by (re)writing some small projects in my company in 2019, too. It is a reasonable way to get into erlang and OTP. Cheers!

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oh… mnesia… From my experience, might be not the best decision if you plan to store more than ~100Gb and have more than one instance

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Yes you are right. :+1:

But my project will never reach the limit, the memory usage of the whole Erlang process is still under 200MB even it has been running for nearly a whole year. (which has surprised me, because all the data are in memory since I did not use disk_only table)

I think we can use Mnesia for small (could be complex at the same time) projects without worrying about the size. After all, most projects in the world are relatively small.

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I work at VMware who employs the whole RabbitMQ core team.

From 2006 to 2010, I worked for Meetic, a French dating website, acquired by Match in 2011. We used ejabberd for the website chat. We developed several components in Erlang around that ejabberd server to integrate it with the rest of the infrastructure. I have no idea if they are still using that today.

I recently heard of æternity, a blockchain written in Erlang. Their mainnet is already deployed and running. That’s good to see Erlang being used in the blockchain/cryptocurrency world!

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Check out Erlang Companies too. I’d love to see more companies up there too :slight_smile:

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If I can get enough interest going at my company, maybe we’ll add it some day. We have many hundreds of programmers for various things. Surely I can get some of them to use Erlang for something. lol

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Unfortunately no chance here to make my company use Erlang, so it’s just a hobby for me, yet.

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Just learnt from the Thinking Elixir podcast that Zoom are using Erlang in production for their chat platform :003: (about 3:40 into the episode)

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