safetyvalve

rash into an explicit error path.

if you do this you might as well ask yourself if you really need redis instead of keeping it all within your Elixir system. Deciding on which node this process lives is still up to you, but there are libraries like locks [3] that allow you to automatically determine a leader in your cluster. And once this is done you can start dealing with overload :) Of course this is just a simple and naive approach, there are a lot of really useful Erlang libraries to check out. Here's a list of libs that helped me when getting started by reading their docs and sources in no particular order: https://github.com/heroku/canal_lock - Erlang lock manager for concurrently variable resource numbers https://github.com/jlouis/safetyvalve - queueing facilities for tasks to be executed so their concurrency and rate can be limited on a running system https://github.com/fishcakez/sbroker - process broker for matchmaking between two groups of processes using sojourn time based active queue management to prevent congestion. https://github.com/ferd/backoff - exponential backoffs and timers to be used within OTP processes when dealing with cyclical events, such as reconnections, or generally retrying things https://github.com/jlouis/fuse - A Circuit Breaker for Erlang https://github.com/basho/sidejob - Parallel worker and capacity limiting library for Erlang https://github.com/pspdfkit-labs/sidetask - My humble Elixir wrapper for basho's sidejob [1] https://github.com/devinus/poolboy also used in Ecto, look through the Ecto sources if you want to see how it's used in Elixir. [2] http://erlang.org/doc/man/global.html [3] https://github.com/uwiger/locks and then https://github.com/uwiger/locks/blob/master/doc/locks_leader...