If you want to use OTP inter-node communication then this is as simple as using libcluster and erpc. There are few gotchas here and there so I would recommend to read the documentation very well if you plan on using it in production.

My only recommendation in this regard is to scale the application vertically as much as you can, since that will save you a great amount of trouble and OTP scales much better vertically than most of runtimes out there.

So pure curiosity?

Architectures like that can be done indeed, but I’d argue that one shouldn’t go there unless there’s a good operational reason for it. E.g. with recent interest in ML/AI in the community there’s a good reason to move that kind of work to a (small) set fo beefy machines with GPU, because having all webservers be such is expensive. This however is not a tool for domain or code organization.

You can adopt a modular desing inside a single OTP application. What problem are you trying to solve with microservices?

I guess this would require having GenServer for handling API calls.

If each app has a single GenServer process that does the calls to the other apps you are introducing a nasty bottleneck from the get go. I would not do that uless I have a specific reason to.

If you really decide to go forward with this: in terms of network, go for HTTP/2 + gRPC if possible (haven’t checked Elixir support but should be fine?). Less overhead in general.

Outside of that, go for simple tokens that expire in 15 - 60 minutes and have a background worker refresh them some 10-30 seconds before they expire. That works quite fine, I’ve done it.

…but in general I’ll echo other posters: don’t splatter your Elixir code in multiple apps if you can help it. One mega server will work much better.

That’s easily doable via env vars or whatever other configuration mechanism you prefer. Your application can just optionally start / not start certain parts of itself depending on them. In fact many projects already do this with dev / test environments: test env does not start most of its runtime dependencies.