Applications are Components (AKA Microservices in Elixir)

[AstonJ]

@OvermindDL1

The BEAM is the operating system. An application is a stand-alone unit
which can be started/stopped independently in the OS. They can be
individually upgraded, installed and removed.

And yep, that is entirely how I see it, as the BEAM being a kind of OS, with Processes on top of it, an Application can spawn many Processes, etc..

It’s nice that that’s how it works under the hood, but we’re creating apps, so (for me anyway) it makes sense to view an app as an application but with several parts to it:

–App
—Component 1
—Component 2
—Component 3
—Component 4