Erlang is a concurrent and distributed functional programming language developed by Ericsson for use in telecommunication hardware. It was designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. Since its release as open source in 1998, it became used by companies world-wide, including Nortel and T-Mobile.

Erlang has suitable features for the implementation of soft real-time fault-tolerant distributed processing systems, and has been used by the MADS group in many research projects like VoDKA.