Around Monday or Tuesday, September 26–27th, 2016, we started to see occasional failures to retrieve sbt artifacts in our CI environment. An incident report.

Starting into Autumn with the September Update on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala. Now it’s time to sit back, grab a coffee and relax while you read through this month’s highlights!

In Enterprise Development Trends 2016, we surveyed 2151 JVM engineers about enterprise thoughts around microservices, fast data, cloud infrastructure and container technology. Among tons of fascinating data, we uncovered three major findings from the data collected...

Companies are moving from systems designed for data "at rest" in data warehouses and embracing the value of data "in motion" at the edge–whether from user data, sensors or humans. Extracting information from incoming data as quickly as possible has become a competitive advantage. Stream processing is the best option and it has sparked new tools, frameworks, and architecture patterns for developers creating applications and systems designed specifically for real-time data. 

I sat down with Dr. Dean Wampler, Office of the CTO and Big Data Architect at Lightbend, we discuss how streaming data is shaking things up, and how the upcoming Lightbend Fast Data Platform is bringing Fast Data to enterprises looking to modernize today.

In this webinar for Architects, guest speaker Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Vice-President and Principal Analyst, joins Jonas Bonér, CTO/Co-founder of Lightbend and creator of Akka, the actor-based, message-driven runtime for the JVM, to discuss one emerging programming pattern that’s gaining popularity with teams developing for the cloud––the Actor model.

Recently, we published a case study with our customer Swisscom, the leading mobile service provider in Switzerland. While the case study focuses more on the solution and implementation details of how Swisscom used Scala and Spark to build a fast data streaming platform from the ground up in just 9 months, there is more to the story. To get a fuller picture, we sat down with Francois Garillot, Big Data Scientist at Swisscom...

We are proud to present the results of the survey conducted in summer 2016. It was launched to discover: correlations between development trends and IT infrastructure trends, how organizations at the forefront of digital transformation are modernizing their applications, and real production usage break-downs of today's most buzzed about emerging developer technologies.

Apache Kafka is the leading distributed messaging system, and Reactive Streams is an emerging standard for asynchronous stream processing. The reactive-kafka project combining the two technologies just recently joint forces with the the Akka team and the resulting collaboration lead to the latest 0.11 release which comes with some major updates. I was interested in learning a little bit more about the history and had a chance to interview Chris.

Just a little more than a week to go and we're super excited to be a bronze sponsor for this year's JavaOne! To also make it exciting for you, we have a lot prepared for you. Make sure to attend the many sessions by our own engineers or about technologies that are part of the Reactive Platform and grab your Lagom t-shirt!

We are happy to announce the availability of Fast Data Architectures For Streaming Applications, a new O'Reilly report authored by the architect for fast data products at Lightbend, Dean Wampler (@deanwampler). In this report he examines the rise of streaming systems for handling time-sensitive problems —like detecting fraudulent financial activity as it happens. You’ll explore the characteristics of fast data architectures, along with several open source tools for implementing them.

Manuel Bernhardt knows a thing of two about building distributed, Reactive web applications for the modern enterprise. Having recently published his own book on the subject, I wanted to sit down with him to ask him about what architects and developers should know about the traits of Reactive systems, why it's important to build Reactive systems using Play, Akka, and Scala rather than Spring and Java EE, how the open source community has wonderfully impacted the growth of these technologies, and whether he'd ever consider writing another book again. Enjoy the Q/A!

August is typically a month filled with vacation, sunburn and the other joys of summer. It's a month where we all take it a bit slower and try to gather more energy for the rest of the year. But it turns out that our amazingly active communities never sleep. And there's been plenty of news and highlights. This Tech Digest is designed to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster. So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the most important information of last month in a single post.

Almost every current monitoring tool relies on a stack frame-based approach where using the stack trace can provide good answers to what caused exceptional states. In asynchronous, message-driven distributed applications, this approach no longer provides any useful information about issues because the path to where you are is no longer available and you don’t know where your code will execute...

Earlier this summer, Lightbend CTO & Co-founder (and creator of Akka) Jonas Bonér  and Enterprise Advocate Kevin Webber were seeing their vacation time more as a far-off dream than a plausible reality. Jonas had just published the free O'Reilly book titled Reactive Microservices Architecture––called "the best single source of the key ideas needed to design modern Reactive systems" by John Nestor––and we wanted to make it even easier to get the principles of microservices architectures into the hands of Enterprise Architects, CTOs, App Dev Managers and other decision makers. With the story of going Reactive with microservices in place, Jonas and Kevin set to work breaking down this concise, valuable book into a three-part series...

Last week, the Lightbend team volunteered at the SF Food Bank, and our VP of Engineering, Derek Henninger, was utterly surprised to find the experience to be an abject lesson in managing Reactive systems (in production!)

In this presentation, Lightbend Developer Advocate Markus Eisele explains why Java EE is not the technology architects and cloud development teams are choosing to gain the benefits of microservices architecture, due to the very different set of requirements to build and handle large-scale enterprise systems.

Do you have plans for October 4th and 5th? We'll be at Reactive Summit, eating BBQ at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas, with Susan Potter, Fred Hebert, Helena Edelson, Peter Alvaro, and Jonas Bonér, talking about how to build, run and manage Reactive systems using microservices and fast data pipelines.

Right on the coattails of today's public announcement by Lightbend and Mesosphere, this special co-webinar with Aaron Williams and Markus Eisele discusses traditional architectures and how they are beginning to evolve very quickly to embrace microservices architecture and various cloud and hybrid-cloud deployment models.

Welcome to our first Lightbend Tech Digest! It's so exciting to keep finding new places where great technical content is published as our communities continue to grow. Inspired by the amazing efforts of our friends like SoftwareMills' Scala Times, Cake Solutions team blog, the Knoldus blog and many others, we wanted to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster.

Just a couple short years ago, Chris Webster, Associate Fellow at Verizon Communications, was presented with a challenge: how to gain part of the fiercely competitive $40 billion US mobile content market. Working with a new team, a content platform was conceived to provide best-in-class streaming for primetime television, live music and sports. They called it go90, referencing the 90-degree pivot from portrait to landscape mode that many of us use to consume video content...