Akka Cluster brings the power, efficiency, resilience, and scalability of Akka actors to massively distributed systems. Developers and Architects that understand how to use Akka Cluster effectively in the cloud, on-premise, and even across multiple data centers have found that it is well worth the effort to learn it—just ask anyone that “gets it.”
One challenge for Akka champions who want to demo the value to others, however, is that all this magic is happening behind the scenes. It’s not easy to immediately visualize how Akka establishes clusters, self-heals nodes, handling network partitions automatically, and so on. Well, now you can.
In this webinar by Lightbend’s Eric Loots, Scala & Tooling Practice Lead, and Kikia Carter, Principal Enterprise Architect, we use a simple yet powerful visualization of a 5-node, Raspberry Pi-based cluster to reveal the inner workings of Akka Cluster. In a matter of minutes, you will gain a strong understanding of clustering, even if you don’t know anything about Akka. Specifically, Kiki and Eric walk you through visualizations that review:
Important core Akka Clustering concepts, like cluster node state (Down, Up, Weakly-up, Joining), leader election and leader role, as well as heartbeating, gossip protocol, and failure detection.
What happens when we add the chaos of a network partition into the mix—leading to a so-called “Split Brain” scenario—and how can Akka HTTP management can help.
How Akka Split Brain Resolver can automatically recover from a network partition and thus avoid a service being unavailable for a long time.
As always, Lightbend is here to help you with your next project. If the time is right for a 20-min introductory call with us, just let us know here:
