Naming Nodes

There’s nothing mysterious about a node. It is simply a running Erlang VM. Throughout this course, we’ve been running our code on a node.

The Erlang VM, called Beam, is more than a simple interpreter. It’s like its own little operating system running on top of our host operating system. It handles its own events, process scheduling, memory, naming services, and interprocess communication. In addition to all that, a node can connect to other nodes in the same computer, across a LAN, or across the Internet, and provide many of the same services across these connections that it provides to the processes it hosts locally.

Implementation

So far, we didn’t name our node because we’ve had only one. If we ask Elixir what the current node is called, it’ll give us a ...