Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Akka is a kick as technology. Today I want to share a video I made about how we can model an actor system using Akka, Scala, SBT, and IntelliJ Idea. We will model a vending machine using Akka and Scala. We will take advantage of the Scala Type system and Akka typed actors. Type Systems are great because they make programming more secure and prevent bugs and require less testing since the compiler does more for you. For this video, we also will be using SBT 1.4.0, Scala 2.13, and Akka 2.6. So I hope you guys like it. So let's get started!

Akka-Streams is one of the many interesting and very useful Akka modules. Akka is a powerful actor / reactive framework for the JVM. Akka is an extremely high-performance library -- you can do Up to 50 million msg/sec on a single machine. Small memory footprint; ~2.5 million actors per GB of the heap. Akka is also resilient by Design and follows the principles of the Reactive Manifesto . Akka follows Erlang Actor philosophy/ideas.  Many big and successful companies use Akka in production like Blizzard, Intel, Wallmart, Paypal, Amazon, Zalando, Netflix, IGN, VMware UBS, and much many more others.

Akka a great actor framework for the JVM.  Akka is high performance with high throughput and low latency, resilient by Design.  It's possible to use Akka with Java however I always used and recommend you use with Scala . Create actors systems is pretty easy however creating multiple nodes on Akka cluster locally could be boring and error-prone. So I want to show how easy is to create an Akka cluster using Scala and Docker (Engine & Docker-Compose). We will create a very simple actor system, we will just log events on the cluster however you can use this as a base to do more complex code.

Akka is a great tool. It has so many cool feature and very impressive performance. Today its one of the best technologies todo lightweight sync or async processing. Great for high frequency trading domains, onlime media, ads and financial. Even if your company is not in one of this domains you can benefit from akka, specially if you are looking for efficiency.  So whats the relation with Microservices architecture(MSA)? Microservices architecture powers distribution over centralization, thats leverage another aspect called Discoverability.