Distributed Elixir (Clustering)

Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, which was built for distributed telecommunications systems decades before "microservices" became a buzzword. When your nodes can talk directly to each other, you unlock capabilities that other languages require external infrastructure to achieve. Distributed PubSub means Phoenix Channels work across nodes without Redis. Global process registries mean you can run exactly one GenServer for a given resource across your entire cluster. Distributed tasks mean background work can run anywhere with automatic load balancing. Most platforms break this by isolating containers or blocking the ports BEAM uses for distribution. Gigalixir preserves it.

Phoenix Channels Without Redis: Distributed PubSub works natively when nodes are clustered. Broadcast a message and it reaches every connected client across every node. No Redis. No external message broker. No additional latency or failure points.

Global Processes That Actually Work: Run exactly one GenServer across your entire cluster for rate limiting, game state, or job coordination. Elixir's :global registry handles leader election and failover. When a node dies, the process restarts on a healthy node automatically.

Distributed Task Execution: Spawn tasks on remote nodes to distribute CPU-intensive work. Process data where it lives. Build MapReduce-style pipelines without Hadoop. The BEAM makes this trivial when your nodes can find each other.

No Daily Restarts Breaking State: Other platforms restart containers arbitrarily for maintenance. We don't. Your distributed processes, ETS tables, and in-memory state survive because we respect how Elixir applications actually work.