libcluster VS horde

Distributed Elixir can be done with Docker containers too, see https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster which by default has some Kubernetes support but you can also have third party (or custom) clustering strategies. I've not done this myself but I've seen articles about this a lot during the past years.

Hot code updates for most applications aren't really worth it in my opinion, assuming you do something like blue/green rollover deployments. It's cool that it's possible though. But it requires appup files and afaik Distillery is one of the release tools that has support for it built-in.

On the deployment level, you can use synchronous communication using API-based solutions or asynchronous communication using external solutions (RabbitMQ, Kafka,...) or Erlang/Elixir tools (message passing, pg2, PubSub, Libcluster,...)

libcluster – Automatic cluster formation/healing for Elixir applications.

CRDTs are one solution to “eventual consistency”. Horde is one option: https://github.com/derekkraan/horde

Horde – Elixir library that provides a distributed and supervised process registry.

No, typically you register a node and instruct it on what processes to run. But there are libraries to help instrument this kind of behavior.

For elixir:

- https://github.com/derekkraan/horde

- https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm