Akka 2.4 plus new commercial features in Typesafe Reactive Platform

Konrad Malawski walks us through the new and upcoming commercial features in Typesafe's Reactive Platform. Reactive Platform is a certified, integration tested, load tested, and secured stack for building Reactive applications with Akka, Play, Spark and Scala or Java. Besides receiving priority updates and fixes, Typesafe also offers long-term support for all the contained technologies, in addition to these commercial-only Akka features not offered in the Akka open source project:

• Handle Network Partitions with Akka Split Brain Resolver (SBR): Akka SBR provides advanced recovery scenarios in Akka Clusters, improving on the safety of Akka’s automatic resolution to avoid cascading partitioning. Instead of defaulting to the auto downing behavior, we now offer various strategies with the SBR to decide if a node is really down.  
• Akka Backport Support for Docker and Network Address Translation (NAT): Run Akka Clusters in Docker containers or NAT with complete hostname and port visibility on Java 6+ and Akka 2.3.11+. 
• Akka Long-Term Support: Receive Akka 2.3 support for Java 6, Java 7, and Scala 2.10. If you are stuck on older Java versions, we have your back. You also can use latest Akka modules (e.g. Streams and http) on an older Java version. If you're not yet ready to jump to Java 8, keep using what you already have.

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Watch the full 60-min webinar

• Akka Cluster Tools: Have been promoted to stable and contain what you already might know: Dustributed Pub/Sub, Cluster Singletons and Cluster Sharding. 

• Akka Streams and Akka HTTP: The 1.0 version of Akka Streams will eventually arrive in 2.4.x soon. Akka Streams provides an implementation of Reactive Streams, and allows asyncronous back-pressure streams processing. Akka HTTP is the successor of spray.io, and provides a streams-based http server implementation.

• Akka Persistence: Another stable feature which enables strong consistency for events written to the persistent journal and allows you to replay commands even if actors fail. 

• Akka Persistence Query: The first experimental feature in the list. Experimental phase features don't have stability problems, but can't guarantee binary compatibility or consistent APIs yet. Akka Persistence Query is built on Akka Streams and allows you to have read access to journals. It doesn't have to be the same database, but allows you to query a specific subset of events.

• Akka Typed: Another exciting, experimental module that is adding typed support and performance features on top of Akka actors by adding typed communication between actors and messages.

• Akka Distributed Data: The Akka Distributed Data module implements various conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). which are data structures that can be concurrently updated and eventually converge on the same value. 

When you're done watching, be sure to also look into Typesafe Monitoring, a featured module inside of Reactive Platform that lets users visualize, track and optimize asynchronous systems using Akka actors. No worries if you aren't using Reactive Platform yet––getting started with it is a simple adjustment to your build.

CHECK OUT TYPESAFE MONITORING