LightBend Company has announced a new major version of Akka. With the release, the JVM toolkit has become a comprehensive platform for building and running applications on various cloud platforms.
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The core of the Akka libraries remain intact, and content from Lightbend projects Lagom, Play Framework, CloudState, CloudFlow, Akka Streams, and Kalix also flow into the platform. Applications that depend on Akka’s 2.x libraries should continue to work smoothly.
In parallel with the new core version, LightBend has announced a name change: the company is now also called Akka.
Akka is a toolkit with an associated runtime environment for the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). It provides models designed to simplify the development of concurrent, distributed applications. As a core concept, it relies on the actuator model, which was developed in the 1970s. Concurrent units act as actuators and communication occurs through message exchange. The Erlang programming language also provides an actuator model.
Akka is written in Scala. The actor implementation was originally planned in the language itself. Jonas Bonner eventually developed Akka based on the style of Erlang’s actuator model. They presented the project to the public in January 2010Akka can be used with both Scala and Java.
In September 2022, LightBend for Akka changed the licensing model from the Apache 2.0 License to the Business Source License (BSL).
work has been going on for six years
According to the release blog post, the first idea for Akka 3 came eight years ago, and development of the new major version began in 2018 in parallel with the 2.x strand of the toolkit.
According to the post, Akka 3 is already in productive use “at companies that are not yet ready to be publicly named,” including a global SaaS provider with 2 million users and over a million IOPS (inputs/ Output Operations) involves an online retailer writing. per second) with low latency required.
advanced sdk
Akka 3 aims to significantly reduce complexity compared to previous versions and brings a new SDK (Software Development Kit) and a local development environment with a developer sandbox and an event debugger.
The SDK makes it possible to create components suitable for programming with Akka: endpoints, units,, Scene, streaming consumer, WorkflowAnd WatchAccording to the blog post, this reduces the learning curve from a few weeks to a few hours.
Free cloud options and serverless applications
With version 3, Akka applications can also run as serverless applications on various cloud platforms (Bring Your Own Cloud, BYOC). From 2025, operations in your own data center or hybrid cloud infrastructure should also be possible. According to Akka, migrating to a serverless model from one cloud provider or cloud platform to another is seamless.
Developers get a new SDK, and Akka applications run on different cloud infrastructures.
(Image: Akka)
Akka 3 also provides multimaster replication: a service can run on multiple instances in multiple clouds or regions. Akka 3 relies on replication event logging and communication via gRPC.
More information Can be found on Akka Blog And That Post on Hacker News Removal Held on 20 November A free webinar on the new major version of Akka,
(rme)
