With the continued growth of Akka Cluster to power cloud native applications around the world, Lightbend has recognized that the timing is right to contribute two commercial-only features to the open source core of Akka: Akka Split Brain Resolver and Akka Multi-DC Persistence.
In the coming weeks, we will integrate Lightbend’s Split Brain Resolver into the core of Akka Cluster as a built-in downing provider. This will make applications based on Akka Cluster simpler and more resilient out of the box, while removing any concerns developers may have around vendor lock-in. This will include our lease strategy that integrates with Kubernetes to help resolve network partition scenarios. This combination will help to cement Akka and Kubernetes as the ideal combination for cloud-native application development.
Over the past year, we have been greatly encouraged by the number of open source implementations of Split Brain Resolvers for Akka. We see these as positive, and look forward to collaborating with the wider community on continuing to improve the resilience of applications built with Akka.
In addition to Split Brain Resolver, Lightbend will be working to integrate the commercial Akka Multi-Data Centre Persistence feature with the core of Akka’s Event Sourcing APIs. This will result in a single API for event sourcing, while providing facilities for reconciling data across multiple geographic regions (e.g. data centers) or maintaining consistency across multiple entities in an active-active (e.g. hot standby) configuration.
While today Akka Multi-DC Persistence currently only supports Apache Cassandra, which already provides cross data center replication, this change will allow us to more easily support additional persistence backends, such as JDBC, which do not commonly provide cross data center replication. This will allow us to provide data replication across multiple geographically distributed JDBC databases without requiring support from the database. We look forward to collaborating on these and other distributed data use cases with the Akka community.
We are excited to bring these two commercial-only features of Akka Platform into the OSS community--it’s here that we see the best opportunities for collaboration, feedback, and further growth of the cloud native ecosystem. What's more, these features allow greater flexibility in deploying Akka while expanding the scope of what it means to be distributed.
Both of these technologies remain fully supported by a Lightbend subscription, which provides access to the experts behind Akka and other Lightbend technologies, as well as self-paced educational courses, and other commercial features for observability, insights, and streaming.
Feel free to contact us if you’d like to speak with someone about bringing Akka Platform into your organization!
