Most likely, your job is heavily focused on helping your organization modernize for the digital era. As the days of purely Object-Oriented Programming and related RPC frameworks come to a close, major enterprises like Walmart, Intel, Samsung, IBM, Norwegian Cruise Lines and HSBC have started migrating to distributed, cloud infrastructures that embraces a different approach: the Actor Model.
When it comes to distributed computing, the Actor Model is the great-grandparent of it all. Created by Carl Hewitt in 1973, Forrester Research recently noted, “the Actor model is seeing renewed interest as cloud concurrency challenges grow.”
Yet even if you understand the Actor Model and used some of the toolkits for it (e.g. Akka and Erlang), how do you easily explain the concept to your team, colleagues and managers? Where do you start?
In Hugh McKee's concise, 43-page O'Reilly book Designing Reactive Systems: The Role Of Actors In Distributed Architecture, we cover:
p.s. Want to learn more about using the Actor Model with Akka, part of Lightbend Reactive Platform, in your team or organization? Let us know if it's time to set up a 15-20 minute chat with someone at Lightbend :)
