Two technologies–Akka Streams and Kafka Streams–have emerged as popular tools to use with Apache Kafka for addressing the shared requirements of availability, scalability, and resilience for both streaming microservices and Fast Data. So which one should you use for specific use cases?

You’re probably heard of the “SMACK Stack”, but you may not know that three Lightbend experts–Sean Glover, Stavros Kontopoulos, and Gerard Maas–that recently teamed up with O’Reilly Media on a free eBook about working with the SMACK stack for Fast Data applications (available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats–or all 3 in a .zip folder)!

In this webinar by Dr. Dean Wampler, VP of Fast Data Architecture at Lightbend, Inc., we cut through the buzz around Fast Data and explore how to successfully exploit this new opportunity for innovation in how your organization leverages data.

In this webinar by Sean Glover (@seg1o), Lightbend Senior Engineer for Fast Data Platform, we go through some best practices that we've learned working with Kafka, DC/OS, and Kubernetes with Lightbend clients.

In this talk by Dean Wampler, PhD., VP of Fast Data Engineering at Lightbend, we’ll look at the criteria you need to consider when selecting technologies, plus the context and background to make good decisions when it comes to adopting streaming frameworks.

In this webinar by Gerard Maas, senior engineer on Lightbend's Fast Data Platform team and co-author of the recent O’Reilly book Learning Spark Streaming, we walk through an introduction of both APIs. At the end of this presentation, you will have a bit more context for guiding your selection of the the right one for your application.

In this webinar with Lightbend Principal Engineer, David Brinegar, we review how OpsClarity is purpose-built to intelligently monitor streaming applications and help Ops teams resolve issues quickly.

In this webinar with Craig Pottinger, Senior Consultant at Lightbend, we examine the design choices around building streaming systems with technologies like Akka Streams, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Mesosphere DC/OS and Lightbend Reactive Platform, all of which come integrated with Lightbend Fast Data Platform.

In this session by Konrad Malawski, author, speaker and Senior Akka Engineer at Lightbend, you will learn how to build these streaming ETL pipelines with Akka Streams, Alpakka and Apache Kafka, and why they matter to enterprises that are increasingly turning to streaming Fast Data applications.

In this webinar, Lightbend’s Senior Product Director, Craig Blitz reviews five early challenges enterprises face when building streaming and Fast Data systems, what to consider and how Lightbend aims to make these choices more straightforward with our upcoming Fast Data Platform.

In this webinar, Dustin Lyons, Engineering Manager at Credit Karma, discusses how his team migrated away from PHP and successfully implemented Akka Streams with Apache Kafka to ingest, process and route real-time events throughout their data ecosystem.

In this new white paper, we outline the functions a modern monitoring solution must perform in order to truly benefit from the advantages promised by Fast Data and streaming applications.

In this Lightbend webinar, we present what to look for in an effective monitoring solution for streaming and Fast Data applications, including a demo of Lightbend Monitoring using sample scenarios to show how we can help your team not just in production, but also during development to catch performance issues before you even deploy.

In this webinar with Sean Glover, Senior Consultant at Lightbend and industry veteran, we examine the rise of streaming systems built around Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra and Kafka, their role in handling endless streams of data to gain real-time insights, and how Lightbend Fast Data Platform (FDP) brings them together in a comprehensive, easy to use, integrated platform, which includes installation, integration, and monitoring tools tuned for various deployment scenarios, plus sample applications.

In this webinar for JVM Architects, Konrad Malawski explores the what and why of Reactive integrations, with examples featuring technologies like Akka Streams, Apache Kafka, and Alpakka, a new community project for building Streaming connectors that seeks to “back-pressurize” traditional Apache Camel endpoints.

In this talk for Architects and Dev Managers by Akara Sucharitakul, Principal MTS for Global Platform Frameworks at PayPal, we look at how back-pressure based on Akka Streams and Kafka is being used in PayPal's mission-critical production systems to handle very bursty workloads.

In this webinar, Lightbend’s Big Data Architect, Dr. Dean Wampler, examines the rise of streaming systems for handling time-sensitive problems, exploring the characteristics of fast data architectures and the open source tools for implementing them.

I recently had a chat with Raymond Roestenburg, co-author of Akka In Action, to ask him about how Akka brings the brilliance of the Actor Model, first developed over 40 years ago, to the mainstream embrace of the JVM, and namely Java 8.

Our Fast Data team at Lightbend has helped create a lot of different services, webinars, books and reports over the last year, so we made a special "mega-pack" of 7 resources to help you get exactly what you need....

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.

Dean Wampler, Big Data Architect at Lightbend, presents the evolution of data processing needs and the reasons behind the emergence of Fast Data technologies like Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Mesos and Reactive Platform technologies such as Akka and Play. 

The gambling industry has arguably been one of the most comprehensively affected by the internet revolution, and if an organization such as William Hill hadn't adapted successfully it would have disappeared. Watch Patrick Di Loreto, R&D Engineering lead for William Hill, deliver to nearly 1300 registrants what his company is doing to grow in a fast-paced industry where milliseconds can matter to users and real-time data analysis and reactions are the keys to competitive advantage.