Your thoughts on Erlang process vs. docker containers?

Use cases— Compare? Contrast?

Many thanks,

LRP

Comparing grains of sand with mountains?

/Jacob

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Please explain.

Let’s see. Which is better, a Vespa or a pantechnicon? They are both means of transport, but one is good when one person needs to travel in narrow city streets using not much fuel, and the other is good when you need to transport a houseful of furniture.

Or to take an older analogy, if a whale and an elephant fought, who would win? If the fight was on land, the elephant. If the fight was at sea, the whale. But they are both large mammals, so isn’t that the same thing?

Docker containers and Erlang processes solve different problems.
Docker containers package up an application and its dependencies so that you can deploy them on lots of other machines without having to ensure that the environment is exactly the same on all of them.
“Run Erlang in a Docker container” makes sense.
Erlang processes are extremely lightweight threads running Erlang (LFE, Elixir, Gleam, …) code.
“Run Docker in an Erlang process” makes no practical sense at all.
(Theoretically, you could do it. But it would be much more fun hunting for Yetis in the Sahara.)

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Many thanks!

LRP