Interactive Demo: Akka Cluster Nodes Under Attack, Visualized

Choose one: DIY recovery or Automated self-healing?

Watch on YouTube

Note: thanks to our attendees for bearing with us during some major technical issues getting started!

Distributed applications running on clusters can come under attack at any time, for many reasons. What do you do when this happens? How can you safely run clusters of networked computers where nodes fail regularly?

In this hands-on session with Hugh McKee, you’ll be able to participate in a live demonstration of Akka Cluster using Lightbend Split Brain Resolver (SBR). Featuring a demo project that you can download, build, and run, you’ll be able to follow along as we experiment with failures. If you’ve joined our webinars in the past, you’ll notice that this session departs from our normal style, and we take regular stops to discuss specifics and answer questions. Here's what you'll learn:

• Intro and set up (10 min) - A brief walk through Akka Cluster and the browser dashboard. You can get set up by installing the project and then interact with the dashboard during the presentation. The only prerequisites are Git, Maven, and Java 8+.
• Cluster under attack (20 min) - We take a look at the dynamics behind failure and recovery with Akka Cluster, especially looking at the difference between DIY recovery and automated recovery with Split Brain Resolver. We’ll demo how SBR handles node failures and network partitions to keep your application cluster as healthy as it can be so that services can restart safely when Kubernetes restarts pods.
• Feedback from the audience and Q/A (10 min) - Here we take questions and suggestions from our audience about cluster manipulation, testing different scenarios, and various features of Akka Cluster and SBR.

Build Your Own Demo To Show Others

This interactive session is part of Hugh's ongoing blog series called "How Akka Cluster Works", which features multiple projects. This project shown here continues from what we started in the first of these projects Akka Cluster Quickstart Dashboard - Part 1: Getting Started, where Hugh goes through the first steps at a easy-to-follow pace. There is also Part 2, which you can find at the bottom of the Part 1 post.

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