My least favorite part about HN is trying to share advice based on real-world experience, only to people show up and armchair quarterback the situation with solutions that sound easy on paper.

You'll have to trust me that we didn't just throw our hands up in the air when dealing with the Erlang situation. We tried a lot of the suggestions here and more.

Erlang is one of those languages that, for whatever reason, lulls engineers into a false expectation that they can pick it up over a few weekends and start knocking out IoT-scale solutions serving 6- and 7-figure connection counts. Speaking from direct experience, that's not only untrue, but it's a dangerous misconception that leads to a lot of pitfalls.

Don't get me wrong, Erlang is great if your problem set matches up neatly to core OTP functionality and well-defined patterns, but you don't have to stray far until you start finding difficult pitfalls that aren't easily addressed by engineers learning Erlang on the fly.