I am hoping this will serve as a reference for coworkers and others new to Erlang and OTP to be able to figure out the terminology easier than I had to. I learned the hard way, so you don't have to!:)
- Erlang/OTP - The set of libraries and conventions that are used as part of the core Erlang distribution by Ericsson to build fault-tolerant, distributed systems more effectively.
- OTP Release - A fully deployable distribution to run on an "Erlang node" (see below). An OTP Release may have one or more OTP Applications running inside of it at any time.
- OTP Application - Usually a stateful long-running and active set of Erlang processes that collaborate together to achieve a well-defined set of responsibilities. It is a packaging of these collaborating modules and processes into a directory structure (see 'OTP Application Conventions' below) along with metadata about the OTP Application and default/fallback environment variable values (in case the OTP Release above doe