title: Questions regarding umbrella app ~> Nano/micro services, Communication
body: <p><strong>-- Background</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm working towards replacing some of our endpoint of our currently Rails rest API, with Elixir. I came to fall in love with the idea of an Umbrella, to which contains a HTTP endpoint (A Phoenix app), and a collection of small nano apps; could be a users app that has full responsibility of interactions with the user data.</p>
  
  <p><strong>--  Questions</strong></p>
  
  <p>Now i want to be able to scale these services independently, say if there is a larger load on the users service. We are using Docker in our current setup up, so ideally i would deploy more of the users app containers.</p>
  
  <p>This means i need some sort of communication, i currently created a proof of concept using GenServer, which works great, but seems to be wrapped around the idea of passing and changing a state. Whereas i just want to pass some data, or reply :ok if the action succeeded.
  I took a look at <a href="http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/task-and-gen-tcp.html" rel="nofollow">http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/task-and-gen-tcp.html</a>, ended of confused about what i should use for communicating.
  So my first question, what is the most ideal way of communicating between my apps?</p>
  
  <p>I also stumbled upon another pain, while developing i still need my apps to talk together, but this means i need to start each app independently, and pass them a --cookie and a --sname. This is fine for now, as i have just 3 apps, but when i have 10, this is a lot of work. I know i cat start the whole project from the umbrella root, but then, how do i pass the required parameters to the individuel app?</p>
  
  <p>Would deeply appreciate some clearance. Thank you.</p>