Some OTP Definitions

Introduction

If you’ve been following Elixir or Erlang, you’ve probably come across OTP. It’s often hyped as the answer to all the woes of high availability distributed applications. It isn’t, but it certainly solves many problems that we’d otherwise need to solve ourselves, including application discovery, failure detection and management, hot code swapping, and server structure.

First, some history. OTP stands for the Open Telecom Platform, but we usually call it OTP. It was initially used to build telephone exchanges and switches. But these devices have the same characteristics we want from any large online application, so OTP is now a general-purpose tool for developing and managing large systems.