Erlang as an Operating System

You can think of the Erlang VM as an operating system for your code.

Your code is organized into top level units called applications. Erlang applications are similar to operating system applications:

  • Can be started and stopped

  • Can depend on other applications

  • Errors in one application don’t affect other applications

  • Application communicate with one another through messages

Applications logically represent a set of processes that work together to provide some set of services. Applications also provide static code that can be used as modules.

As an example, consider the Apache web server httpd. httpd is an application. You can install it, start it, use its services, and stop it when you’re done with it. You typically configure a server to start httpd automatically when the server starts and it runs until the server is stopped.

While httpd is running, you can access its “services” (in this case HTTP and HTTPS servers) through network sockets. When httpd is stopped, those sockets are closed and the services are no longer available.

Apache also ships httpd with libraries that can be used by other programs – e.g. httpd ships with a number of “mods”. These libraries are not started as OS processes, but they can be used by programs that dynamically link to them.

Erlang applications work the same way. In fact, Erlang has its own httpd server – a fully functional web server, complete with a set of “mods” similar to Apache!

To illustrate, start an Erlang VM using erl.

First, start the inets application, which provides a set of basic Internet related client and server support:

1> application:start(inets).
ok

With the inets application started, we can create some servers. Let’s start an httpd server on port 8081 that uses mod_get to serve files from a directory:

2> inets:start(httpd, [{server_name, "hello"},
                       {port, 8081},
                       {server_root, "/tmp"},
                       {document_root, "/tmp"},
                       {modules, [mod_get]}]).
{ok, <0.46.0>}

From a system shell, create a simple file in /tmp to read:

$ echo "Hello, Erlang" > /tmp/hello.txt

In your browser, visit the URL http://localhost:8081/hello.txt.

You should see “Hello, Erlang”, which is being served by the Erlang httpd server from /tmp!

Now, stop the inets application:

3> application:stop(inets).
=INFO REPORT==== 14-Mar-2012::19:59:31 ===
    application: inets
    exited: stopped
    type: temporary

Try viewing the hello.txt URL again – the server isn’t running!

This might not seem terribly important – but consider the implications of “Erlang as an Operating System”. Operating systems provide two invaluable services to application developers:

  • Manage complex systems of applications, consistently and reliably

  • Let application developers build small, focused applications (e.g. web servers) that are decoupled yet communicate effectively using shared protocols

This is true of Erlang as well!

When you build Erlang “applications” you are, in fact, building Erlang “systems”. This is not merely a semantic difference! Systems are assemblies of smaller, independent parts. With smaller, more focused, independent parts – i.e. the applications you build with e2 – you get a number of benefits:

  • As a developer, you can use the principle Separation of Concerns to drive your development of services, features, etc

  • With smaller, fine grained components, a fault is more limited in scope and impact than with larger, coarse grained components

  • By defining the interactions between components as a set of protocols, you can change or replace implementations without breaking functionality

  • You can deploy new functionality by installing and running new applications