Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. It was originally developed by Ericsson and has been used in several large telecommunication systems, some which have achieved an up-time of 5 nines. The aim is to present a brief history of Erlang to emphasize its strength and give brief examples on how Erlang is used for large distributed fault-tolerant concurrent systems.

Mazen Harake, a former student of IT-University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has been commercially active in development and design of Erlang systems at Erlang Training and Consulting for 4 years. He has been part of designing large distributed soft real time systems with emphasis on service and product quality.

Martin Carlson, also a former student of IT-University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has been commercially active at Erlang Training and Consulting for 5 years and has mainly been working as an architect and designer of large distributed systems soft real time systems with emphasis load handling and high throughput performance.