alt Hacker NewsAre individual agents deployable on their own or does the entire "app" of agents need to be deployed as a single group? If individually deployable, what does this look like from a version control and a CI/CD perspective?
Replies
nine_k • last Sunday at 3:21 PM
To the best of my knowledge: yes, individual parts are deployable separately, within reason. No, there explicitly no need to deploy the whole thing at once, and especially to shut it down all at once.
Erlang works by message passing and duck typing, so, as long as your interfaces are compatible (backwards or forwards), you can alter the implementation, and evolve the interfaces. Think microservices, but when every function can be a microservice, at an absolutely trivial cost.
Conceptually, individual subtrees are deployable on their own. In practice, it generally makes sense to mark some subtrees as intended for individual deployment, creating what's known in the BEAM community (Erlang/Elixir/some other) as an "Umbrella app". Your umbrella app launches a tree of sub-apps, which are themselves subtrees. Depending on your view on monorepos, each individual sub-app could be its own repo, or just a subdivision of a single large repo. You basically take the same approach you would with microservices, but your orchestration is built into the language.