The Erlang image packages the Erlang/OTP runtime — the BEAM VM — plus core OTP applications and standard libraries (kernel, stdlib, sasl, crypto, mnesia) and necessary system dependencies to run releases. It includes container-aware startup and signal handling, runtime tracing and logging hooks, and commonly required native libraries for networking and cryptography.
Teams run the image as the base for containerized Erlang releases and stateful distributed services — message brokers, signaling and real‑time messaging, telecom control planes, and supervised application trees — within orchestrators where liveness/readiness probes and controlled shutdown are required. In secure or regulated environments an Erlang hardened image is evaluated for reduced attack surface, timely CVE patches, minimal privileged components, reproducible builds, and verified crypto to satisfy compliance and audit controls.
The Minimus Erlang image differs from typical Erlang container images by being built from scratch with only the essential runtime components and dependencies required to run your BEAM applications. By excluding unnecessary OS tooling, shells, package managers and extra libraries, the Minimus Erlang image presents a reduced attack surface, is faster to start, lighter on disk and memory, and simpler to maintain and patch across environments.
As a Minimus hardened Erlang image, it is configured with secure defaults and hardening controls aligned to industry standards such as NIST SP 800-190 and relevant CIS Benchmarks, so the runtime minimizes privilege, removes exploitable services, and enforces configuration baselines that support operational security and compliance requirements.
Erlang is a programming language and runtime built for highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, distributed systems. It runs on the BEAM VM and uses OTP to structure applications with supervision trees, hot code upgrades, and fault isolation. It excels in telecoms, messaging, chat servers, real-time analytics, and scalable backends.
In practice, teams package Erlang apps as container images. An Erlang image can run microservices with reliable supervision and live upgrades. For production, use a hardened Erlang image to minimize surface area and tighten security.
Examples of systems built with Erlang include messaging brokers (RabbitMQ), distributed data stores (Mnesia, Riak), and telecom switches. It remains popular where uptime and concurrency matter.
There is no credible record that Ericsson banned Erlang. Ericsson originally developed Erlang and OTP, and released it to the open-source community in the 1990s. Today Ericsson still uses, supports, and contributes to Erlang, so a ban is a misconception.
In practice, teams deploying Erlang in containers rely on official tooling, and for production work a hardened Erlang image is commonly used to reduce attack surfaces and fix security issues.
Erlang refers to two related things in tech: a unit of telecommunications traffic and the concurrent programming language named Erlang, developed for fault-tolerant systems used in telecoms.
The traffic unit Erlang measures traffic load as the number of simultaneous calls. One Erlang equals one hour of continuous call activity. The unit is named after Agner Krarup Erlang, a Danish mathematician who laid foundations for queueing theory.
In container deployments, use a hardened Erlang image.