Erlang/OTP and Elixir can provide a strong runtime foundation for agentic applications: processes isolate work, supervisors manage worker lifecycles, and distributed Erlang can connect nodes. They do not provide an agent’s reasoning, model integration, tool permissions, or durable workflow semantics. Those remain application responsibilities.
What OTP contributes to an agentic application
OTP is a set of design principles and components for structuring concurrent, fault-tolerant applications—not an agent framework. Its building blocks help organize application code, run independent work concurrently, and define how components respond when processes fail. The Erlang/OTP Design Principles describe a supervision tree as “a hierarchical arrangement of code into supervisors and workers, making it possible to design and program fault-tolerant software.” Erlang/OTP Design Principles
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For an agentic application, a model call or external tool invocation is still work your application must implement. OTP can structure the processes that perform and coordinate that work; it does not decide what to ask a model, which tool to call, whether a proposed action is authorized, or how to preserve a task across a restart.
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A practical design is to give independently managed units of work clear ownership and message contracts. The following are illustrative architecture choices, not prescribed OTP components:
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- Session coordinator: tracks the current task and coordinates model and tool steps.
- Model-provider adapter: handles requests and responses for a chosen model service.
- Tool executor: validates and performs a permitted external action.
- Background worker: handles work that should continue outside an interactive session.
Choose process boundaries based on which work should fail and restart together. Keep state ownership explicit: if a coordinator owns a conversation state, decide what happens to that state when its process exits. Any information that must survive a process or node restart needs a durable store; an in-memory process state alone cannot provide that guarantee.
Define which failures should restart only one worker and which should restart a related group. Keep deterministic orchestration—such as validating arguments and enforcing tool permissions—distinct from model-driven decisions. That separation makes it easier to reason about the boundary between an unpredictable model response and actions your application is responsible for controlling.
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Choose a supervision strategy for each failure boundary
Supervisors start, stop, and monitor child processes, then apply the configured restart strategy when a child terminates. The Erlang/OTP supervisor manual describes three commonly used strategies:
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|---|---|---|
one_for_one |
Restarts only the failed child. | A tool worker can be restarted without restarting an unrelated session coordinator. |
one_for_all |
Restarts the group of children. | A tightly coupled set of workers can be restarted together when they must share a consistent lifecycle. |
rest_for_one |
Restarts the failed child and children started after it. | Later workers can be restarted when their operation depends on an earlier child that has failed. |
These strategies determine process lifecycle behavior, not transaction semantics. Restarting a tool executor cannot reverse an external action or prove whether a request completed before its connection failed. For tool calls with side effects, design timeouts, retry rules, idempotency, and—where appropriate—compensation explicitly. Validate strategy behavior and configuration against the OTP version your application targets; the supervisor manual is version-specific. Erlang/OTP supervisor manual
Links and supervision are related, but not interchangeable
Erlang processes can be linked, and exit signals provide mechanisms for coordinating termination behavior. These mechanisms underpin failure handling, but creating links does not by itself define a sound recovery policy. A deliberate supervision tree gives the application a place to specify which child failures should trigger a restart and how broadly that restart should apply. Erlang reference manual: processes
For an agent application, consider whether a failed model adapter should be restarted independently, whether a group of dependent workers should restart together, and what state must be restored after a restart. The right choice depends on the relationships between components and on the consequences of repeating their work.
Use distributed Erlang only as a deliberately chosen boundary
Distributed Erlang supports connections and monitoring among Erlang nodes, remote process spawning, and message exchange. It is primarily intended for Erlang-to-Erlang communication; it is not a general-purpose public-network protocol or a cross-language integration layer. Erlang/OTP documentation: Distributed Erlang
That runtime capability does not establish that a particular deployment is secure or suitable. A team considering node distribution still needs deployment-specific decisions about trust boundaries and operational controls. A connection between nodes is not, on its own, an authorization policy or a reason to expose a cluster to an untrusted network.
Distribution is one coordination option, not a requirement for an agent system. Choose among local process messages, distributed Erlang nodes, and external queues or services based on the failure boundaries and operational needs of the application.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Design the workflow beyond process restarts
A supervisor can bring a process back; it cannot reconstruct data that was never persisted or make an external action safe to repeat. For a multi-step task, decide how the system records progress and handles uncertain outcomes—for example, when a tool request may have succeeded even though the worker did not receive its response.
- Durability: identify which task state must survive worker, node, and deployment restarts, and store it accordingly.
- Retries and side effects: define timeouts, retry limits, idempotency behavior, and compensation for actions that cannot simply be repeated.
- Observability: make it possible for operators to inspect failures and follow a task across model and tool steps.
- Decision boundaries: keep policy checks and other deterministic safeguards in application code rather than assuming a model response enforces them.
These are workflow and application-design concerns, not guarantees supplied by supervision or distributed process messaging.
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A practical design checklist
- List the agent’s components and the work each one owns, including model calls, tool execution, and coordination.
- Define message contracts and state ownership for each process boundary.
- Choose which failures warrant restarting one worker, a group, or later-started dependent workers.
- Persist the task information that must outlive a process restart.
- Specify how external side effects are authorized, timed out, retried, deduplicated, or compensated.
- Select local messaging, distributed Erlang, or external coordination based on deployment requirements.
- Check API details and examples against the OTP release used by the application; the official documentation cited here spans different versions.
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