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Erlang in the Cloud

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There’s a lot of debate about how much can be abstracted away by “the cloud”, but on the other side there is always a concrete implementation to create a service. Here’s an interesting case study around a highly scalable consumer SAAS application –  Facebook’s Chat service. The article is a bit older (May), but it’s still timely, in showing how choice of implementation language matters in architecture. And Erlang is one of those programming languages that usually only comes up in rarefied telecom circles or when software engineers want to demonstrate that the feathers in their plume are brighter than others. Seeing it outside of its normal hiding places and showcased on a stage like Facebook is interesting in its own right.