Lightbend, a provider of cloud-native microservices frameworks, has unveiled Akka Distributed Cluster (Akka v.23.05), a solution that would offer “cutting-edge” capabilities for accelerating data delivery, ensuring application availability, reducing costs, and streamlining development efforts across multiple data centers.
By combining the innovative features of Akka with distributed computing capabilities, enterprises can now build mission-critical cloud-native applications more efficiently than ever before, according to Lightbend.
“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, Founder and CEO of Lightbend.
The launch of Akka Distributed Cluster would mark a significant milestone in cloud-to-edge computing. It may empower businesses to expand their cloud native applications seamlessly across multiple data centers, regardless of whether they are multi-region, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premise deployments. With this release, Lightbend aims to blur the boundaries between cloud and edge computing and establish a new paradigm for the evolving cloud-to-edge continuum.
Jonas Bonér, Founder and CEO of Lightbend, emphasized the flexible nature of the cloud and edge environments. He stated, “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. Akka Distributed Cluster introduces groundbreaking capabilities that bridge the gap between cloud and edge, propelling the industry towards a unified approach to distributed computing.”
Central Cloud to the Far Edge
Akka Distributed Cluster comprises several notable features that enhance its performance and reliability across distributed environments. These features would include the following:- Brokerless Pub/Sub - This feature would facilitate low-latency, high-performance Publish-Subscribe over gRPC, ensuring guaranteed delivery without the need for managing message brokers. It would operate efficiently even in memory-constrained environments, spanning from the central cloud to the far edge.
- Brokerless Pub/Sub Event Filtering - Building upon the Brokerless Pub/Sub functionality, this enhancement enables dynamic event filters on the producer or client side, preventing the transmission and processing of unnecessary data. By reducing network costs and freeing up hardware resources, this feature would prove particularly valuable at the edge.
- Active-Active Event Sourcing - Leveraging distributed event journal replication, powered by gRPC, CRDTs, and the new Brokerless Pub/Sub, this feature would enable ultra-efficient, low-latency replication. According to Lightbend, it guarantees eventual solid consistency of event-sourced actors/entities across various data centers or Points-of-Presence at the far edge.
- Durable State Queries - This capability allows users to search for data based on multiple fields without the need for additional read models. It reduces the cost and time associated with storing and interacting with duplicate data.
