But with Erlang, you can have a distributed network of Erlang servers where the server is a generic computing resource that can do anything the client wants.
The code actually comes from the client. No need to get your system administrators to install some binary on all the machines. You simply pass the function along and the remote machine calls it.
It’s possible people are showing the capability of BEAM thou
Is pushing new code for your server to run "arbitrary code execution"? I guess we can call it that. Is it an exploit?
Depends if the code comes from some random person on the internet from mechanisms that you don't intend for pushing new code to run (e.g. through a buffer overflow on your server or XSS), or if it comes from yourself through your official mechanisms.
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...
I often wonder what would have happened if the "BEAM renaissance" (driven largely by the birth of Elixir and associated tools) had happened a decade earlier, before Kubernetes became the de-facto standard for ad-hoc distributed computing in web software.