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Erlang @ bet365

Dan Macklin Head of R&D

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Background

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We use Erlang a lot at bet365

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Why?

Because we have lots of suitable

problems

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However introducing Erlang was a challenge

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First someone has to find Erlang

(Not easy until recently)

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Then you’ve got to convince some people to try it

(Luckily we have an R&D team)

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After which you’ve got to find a

suitable project (In our case Publishers)

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Which needs to get into production, which involves getting more

people involved

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Finally once one system is live you

need to start evaluating other

projects

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It can be difficult to get a big enough

critical mass

Why?

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Where do we use

Erlang?

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Push

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Cash - out

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OLTP Processing

Going beyond SQL (A very interesting use case – Scaling a huge SQL database whilst improving availability and

developer productivity)

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So how did we go

beyond SQL?

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Distributed Approach

(CAP – We are CAP)

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Riak

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Sync Free (avoid synchronisation)

Understand the application invariants for each use case

If you want scalability write bespoke code for key use cases

Model the data differently

If appropriate use CRDTs

Look at what Peter Bailis and the EU SyncFree project are doing

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Erlang

The common denominator

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It makes you think

differently in subtle ways

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I think it made me and my team more rounded problem

solvers

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So where does

Erlang as a ecosystem go

next?

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We need to make Erlang easier to

find

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We need to make

the adoption journey easier

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Historically the tooling is poor

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There are many really good libraries

but they are not consistently

maintained and supported

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Some libraries are

missing

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A bit of an ivory

tower

#ErlangDidThis25yearsAgo

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Look at the Elixir Community

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Erlang Industrial User

Group

Move from a user group to a foundation

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What are bet365 doing to help?

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We are members of the EIUG

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We are involved in two open source projects

https://github.com/bet365

SOAP

Enhancing ODBC

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The Future of Erlang at bet365

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Questions???

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