In a significant move that underscores its commitment to application resilience, Lightbend has rebranded itself as Akka while simultaneously launching Akka 3, a major evolution of its popular microservices development platform. The company's flagship product, which already powers over 100,000 applications used by industry giants like Netflix, Tesla, Apple, and Walmart, now introduces groundbreaking capabilities including cross-cloud replication and the industry's first application resilience guarantee.

In this exclusive VMblog interview, Tyler Jewell, CEO of Akka, discusses the company's strategic transformation and its vision for making applications "Responsive by Design" - a approach that promises to fundamentally change how enterprises think about application reliability and infrastructure dependencies.

VMblog: Since our last Q&A with you Tyler, a lot has happened with the company! Most notably, this week, you launched Akka 3 and rebranded the company (formerly Lightbend) as Akka. Congratulations! In a general sense, tell our readers about what prompted today's news.

Tyler Jewell: I think this week's news, including the launch of Akka 3 - the next generation of Akka - and our rebrand from Lightbend to Akka, is really the culmination of some intense introspection we've been having regarding our company, its mission, and our customers' needs moving forward. Over the years, our industry has spent trillions on infrastructure that cannot guarantee an application's Service Level Agreements (SLAs).  At the same time, organizations demand flexibility and responsiveness, yet an application SLA is bound to slow-changing infrastructure. This needs to change. We think it's time for the industry to think app-down instead of infrastructure-up. As Gartner states, "Infrastructure resilience alone is insufficient to deliver the zero-downtime services that end users expect." We believe that until your application takes responsibility for its own outcomes, you will have an uncertain future. That's why we've made sure that, with Akka, anyone can build and run apps that are Responsive by Design - guaranteeing SLAs by adapting continuously and independently of the infrastructure.

VMblog:  Explain this concept, "Responsive by Design"?

Jewell: Most people understand a responsive app in terms of a front-end web app-these types of apps react to changes in the browser window or the device. That web app is responsive if it is designed to adapt to these changes and still provide a great user experience and outcome. Akka extends the concept of responsiveness to the broader ecosystem of services that businesses run in cloud native infrastructure. A cloud native app based on Akka is elastic to workload changes, resilient to failures, and agile to operational changes like schema changes and upgrades. Industry titans and disruptive startups alike use Akka when the responsiveness of their applications must be guaranteed.

VMblog: Tell our readers more about Akka and the next generation of the product.

Jewell: Specifically, the company is launching a reinvention of the world's most popular developer toolkit for creating microservices that scale to billions of users, processing terabytes of data with deterministic latency and guaranteed resilience. Akka powers more than 100K applications used by millions of developers and touches billions of users daily, powering apps at Netflix, GM, Tesla, Apple, Starbucks, MS, WebEx, Epic Games, John Deere, Swiggy, Dream11, and Walmart.

Akka customers will tell you that it is incredibly powerful and "it just works". However, Akka has historically had a steep learning curve for application developers to build and operate their apps. The new Akka tackles both these challenges. Now, Akka is simple, requiring most developers less than a day to learn and begin building a distributed app. And now, we provide environments to run Akka apps with automation that does not require operators to understand the app's infrastructure: clouds, hyperscaler config, regions, databases, storage, Kubernetes, VMs, or proxies. 

VMblog: I read that Akka is introducing a number of industry-firsts to the market. What are they?

Jewell: Akka has multiple industry-firsts, including the first to replicate and migrate apps across hyperscalers, the first runtime with multi-master replication, and the first vendor to indemnify an app's resilience.

Akka now enables developers to create an application once and then have it run and replicate its data across any cloud, region, or data center. Applications can migrate from one to another without users experiencing downtime. That gives significant leverage back to the enterprise when negotiating with infrastructure vendors. These same capabilities mean that an enterprise can move its app from the cloud to an on-prem data center at the click of a button. In the past, that repatriation meant a full rewrite of the application. This saves enterprises hundreds of hours, not to mention incredible agility. Additionally, Akka is making Day 2/Day N operations fully automated so that operators are alleviated from the burden of replication, elasticity planning from spikes or idleness, and automatic recovery from any failure.

Finally, Akka is putting its money where its mouth is by guaranteeing the resilience of apps that are built on Akka by indemnifying customers from the loss of an application's data. That's never been done before. We're very comfortable making these guarantees, as no app built using Akka has ever lost its data.

VMblog: Lightbend has rebranded and is now called Akka. Why?

Jewell:  The name change better reflects who we are as a company. Akka stands for apps that are responsive to change, and enabling these outcomes is (and has been) the mission that our founder, Jonas Bonér, undertook when creating the company. It carries forward within our name and values. Akka is clearly our flagship solution and our primary focus as a company, and that's never going to change.

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