Lightbend announced the launch of Akka Distributed Cluster
(Akka v.23.05), which brings innovative new capabilities for accelerating data
delivery to users; maintaining application availability even in the event of a
cloud provider outage; cutting costs by minimizing data storage expenses and
reducing server data traffic; and conserving developer time. These new
features, combined with Akka, one of the most powerful platforms for
distributed computing, give enterprises the ability to build mission-critical
cloud native applications in less time than ever.
"I have long maintained that the demarcation
between ‘cloud' and ‘edge' is not a clear boundary, but a spectrum of
environments based on the specific requirements of the application use case,"
said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend's founder and CEO. "Akka Distributed Cluster brings
industry-first capabilities that blur the distinctions between cloud and edge
and continue our progress in building a new paradigm for tomorrow's
cloud-to-edge continuum."
Akka Distributed Cluster is comprised of the
following:
- Brokerless Pub/Sub: Experience low-latency, high-performance Publish-Subscribe over
gRPC, with guaranteed delivery, eliminating the need for message broker
management. This ensures efficient operation in memory-constrained
environments, from the central Cloud to the Far Edge.
- Brokerless Pub/Sub
Event Filtering: Building on
Brokerless Pub/Sub, this enhancement allows dynamic event filters on the
producer or consumer side to prevent sending and processing unnecessary
data. Consequently, network costs are reduced, and hardware resources are
freed up by only transferring the required data when needed. This feature
is particularly crucial at the Edge.
- Active-Active Event
Sourcing: Utilize distributed
event journal replication-running on gRPC, leveraging CRDTs, and the new
Brokerless Pub/Sub for ultra-efficient, low-latency replication. This
guarantees eventual solid consistency of event-sourced actors/entities
across different data centers or Point-of-Presences at the Far Edge.
- Durable State Queries:
Search for data on
multiple fields without additional read models, reducing the cost and time
spent storing and interacting with duplicate data.
These new
capabilities enable Akka Distributed Cluster to maximize cloud capabilities,
ensuring efficiency, correctness, and resilience. Lightbend will continue to
build new capabilities into Akka that will push the boundaries of what's
possible with distributed computing.