Underlying Connection Behind High IOT Concurrency

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Hi all. I’m new to Erlang. Everywhere I read, I see how good Erlang is at managing high-concurrency applications.

In my world (IOT) this is a perfect fit.

However, I’m curious what most web-based systems out there use to connect, say, site or application visitors to an Erlang server.

I imagine it goes something like this:

Browser/App → Websocket → Erlang Server → gen_server/registry update → pipe back and forth between.

I imagine this would be useful in situations like

  • Real time positional tracking (like where a car is on the map)
  • Chatrooms
  • General dashboards? In addition to standard REST API’s?
  • Online matchmaking/multiplayer (Assuming Activision utilized web sockets for this?)

Not 100% sure, but very curious.

Or is there another suggested protocol besides websockets?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

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If by “IOT” you mean Internet-of-Things, you may want to look at Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) (RFC7252).

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Or is there another suggested protocol besides websockets?

MQTT protocol is fairly popular for IoT. Shameless self-promotion: we built a platform (in Erlang) that tries to solve all IoT scenarios in a self-contained package: GitHub - emqx/emqx: The most scalable open-source MQTT broker for IoT, IIoT, and connected vehicles

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I second the MQTT solution.

In Zotonic we use MQTT over Websocket for the communication between the web-browser and the server. Works like a charm, and MQTT takes care of retrying failed messages etc.

On the client we have a MQTT topic tree, and a bridge topic to the server. On the server we have client topics where any messages for the clients are routed through.

We use response-topics for implementing “calls” to models and other functions on the server.

See also our talk about this subject:

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