akka akka-cluster akka-persistence multi-dc

Akka Goes Global: Introducing Clustering And Persistence For Multi-Data Center Deployments

Bringing Akka Actors, Cluster, And Persistence To Apps In Multiple DCs

From all of us at Lightbend, we're happy to introduce new functionality that lets you bring your Akka applications into a truly global environment. Meet two new Akka modules:

Akka Multi-Data Center Clustering (open source)
Akka Multi-Data Center Persistence (part of our commercial Enterprise Suite).

In the short video above, Senior Akka Engineer Konrad Malawski (@ktosopl) goes over the motivation, design, and details of each module. So, why is support for multiple data centers a good thing?

For especially large and performant distributed systems, there are benefits to operating clusters between multiple data centers to ensure responsiveness no matter what’s happening.

Until now, however, it was not possible to move an actor from one DC to another without it losing state, meaning that it wouldn’t know what it was supposed to do when it arrived—in addition, handling network partitions at the DC level is considerably more risky.

To conquer this, these Akka Multi-DC modules provide the capability of deploying the same scalable and resilient Akka applications across different data centers around the globe without the risk. Some of the benefits include:

Better responsiveness at scale: With Akka Multi-DC modules, you can better serve requests from a location near the user and rely on additional resources when scaling to handle peaks in traffic.
Hardens resilience against network issues: For use cases in which availability of some nodes in a cluster is critical, Akka Multi-DC Persistence helps mitigate the effect of network partitions across data centers.
Improves engineering productivity: We provide Akka Multi-DC modules so that you doesn’t have to spend time or find expertise to firefight your own infrastructure with hand-rolled scripts and custom integrations.

If you want to learn more, review the recent blog post by the Akka team and some docs about Akka commercial features as part of a subscription on the Lightbend Tech Hub. As always, you can reach us fastest by requesting contact through our brief form here:

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