The talk

Clusterf**ctional — Haarlem, October 21, 2026, 40 minutes including Q&A. Devs who have only done cross-service communication over HTTP; people curious how distribution works deeper in the stack; anyone running services in Kubernetes.

Structure superseded

The act table below reflects the earlier bottom-up outline. The current leading structure is the V shape (decided 2026-10-10). Update this table once the V shape survives rehearsal.

Source of truth

The outline and abstract live outside this site, in talk/talk-outline.md and talk/abstract.md. This page maps them onto the research; it does not restate them. When the outline changes, update the table below.

Act by act

Part	Time	Research
Act 1 — EPMD & Erlang distribution	3 min	Erlang distribution
Act 1 — libcluster	2 min	libcluster
Act 1 — Live demo, two nodes	3 min	Experiments
Act 2 — Service registration, client pattern, retries, two-tier messaging	15 min	NETZlive in production
Act 3 — Dependency tax, boilerplate, when not to cluster	10 min	Trade-offs
Closing — four principles	2 min	—

The Alm metaphor

The abstract frames distributed Elixir through herding goats on a Swiss Alm. Each mapping should hold up technically, or be flagged on stage as a stretch. Track them here.

Alm	BEAM	Holds up?
Looking for the next unmilked goat	Node.list()
Herd splits on the way up the mountain	Netsplit
Goats spread out so no spot gets overgrazed	Process distribution	Abstract already calls this a stretch