Seth Falcon
Development Lead at Opscode
Opscode
Seth Falcon is a Development Lead at Opscode and has been busy porting Opscode's Hosted Chef API to Erlang. He is a committer to The R Project, an Erlang enthusiast, and has experience developing software for bioinformatics as well as high-volume web APIs.
Seth Falcon is Giving the Following Talks
The Pooler Story: How I Learned OTP by Writing a Connection Pool
Pooler is a generic process pooling OTP application. It was originally designed as a connection pool for Riak and was later repurposed to pool Postgresql connections in Opscode's Hosted Chef web service.
This is the story of the design evolution of pooler and how it helped me understand OTP. The primitives for process linking in Erlang make building an exclusive access pool easy. The task of composing those primitives in a way that follows the OTP design principles is less straight forward for the beginner.
In this talk I'll describe the journey from simple gen_server to
complete OTP application and highlight some lessons learned when running the application under load and integrating it into OTP
releases.
Talk objectives:
- Introduce pooler, a generic process pooling application
- Highlight how the primitives available in OTP make writing a connection pool easy.
- Admit that even in Erlang, writing a connection pool is still hard.
- Demonstrate standard OTP features such as gen_servers, supervisors, and monitoring in the context of an application used in production.
Target audience: Erlang developers interested in learning or teaching OTP principles. Those looking for a connection pool.
