Erlang and OTP for Distributed, Fault-Tolerant Systems
Erlang was built at Ericsson to run telephone switches that could not go down — and that origin shapes everything about the language. Its actor model, lightweight processes, and let it crash philosophy make it one of the few platforms where nine-nines availability is a realistic engineering target, not a marketing claim. The OTP framework layers battle-tested abstractions — GenServer, Supervisor, state machines — on top of that foundation, giving you the standard patterns used in production systems at WhatsApp, RabbitMQ, and CockroachDB.
What You Will Learn
You will start with Erlang's concurrency model and process primitives, then move into OTP's core: writing GenServer callbacks, structuring supervision trees, and applying fault-tolerance strategies that isolate failures before they cascade. From there the track covers advanced OTP behaviors and gen_statem state machines, distributed Erlang node communication, dynamic supervision, and live code upgrades without stopping a running system. Later courses address Mnesia — Erlang's built-in distributed database — performance profiling, observability, and securing distributed nodes. The track closes with real-world OTP design patterns and architecting resilient distributed applications end to end.
The Learning Path
Twelve courses span A2 through C2. The track opens at A2 with Erlang Fundamentals and Concurrency Basics, steps up to B2 for OTP Core and error-handling fundamentals, then advances through eight C1 courses covering distributed Erlang, release management, Mnesia, and security. The final two C2 courses — Building Resilient Distributed Applications and Real-world Erlang OTP Design Patterns — consolidate everything into production-grade system design.
How It Works
Each course is split into short, focused lessons you complete in the built-in code editor with real-time feedback. An AI tutor is available whenever you get stuck on a supervision tree or a tricky distributed-messaging scenario, so you keep moving without losing context.
