Lightbend Announces the Industry’s First Programming Model Enabling Application Development for both Cloud and Edge

The latest version of Akka enables the creation of high-performance, cloud-native applications that seamlessly transition from the Cloud to the Edge

SAN FRANCISCO, October 31, 2023 – Lightbend, Inc., the company providing cloud-native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, today announced the release of its latest version of Akka, one of the industry’s most powerful platforms for distributed computing, which incorporates a new and unique programming model that enables developers to build an application once and have it work across both cloud and edge environments.

“Today, applications developed for cloud native environments are generally not well-suited to the edge and vice versa,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “This has always struck me as counter-productive, as both architectures lean heavily on one another to be successful. As the line between cloud and edge environments continues to blur, Akka Edge brings industry-first capabilities to enable developers to build once for the Cloud and, when ready, deploy seamlessly to the Edge.”

Until today, developers have been forced to use different solutions when building for the cloud and edge. For the first time, Akka delivers a model that allows teams to quickly build a single cloud native application for both cloud and edge environments.

“Akka has been a powerful enabling technology for us to build high-performance cloud systems for our clients,” said Jean-Philippe Le Roux, CEO of Reflek.io, an innovative company delivering Digital Twin technologies to geo-distributed companies. “We have been able to dramatically speed our time-to-production by building a single solution for both cloud and edge with Akka.”

Akka provides a singular programming model that eliminates the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers the Edge has posed for development teams wanting to bridge the Edge and Cloud. Developers focus on business logic, not complicated, time-consuming tool integrations. As a result, businesses can harness, distribute, and fully utilize the vast amount of intelligent data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated. Some specific capabilities of the latest version of Akka include:

• Adaptive Data Availability
  • Projections over gRPC for the Edge - asynchronous, brokerless service-to-service communication
  • Scalability and efficiency improvements to handle the large scale of many edge services
  • Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
  • Temporal, geographic, and use-based migration
• Run Efficiently In Resource Constrained Environments
  • Support for more constrained environments such as running with GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions
  • Support for multidimensional autoscaling and scale to near zero
  • Lightweight storage, for running durable actors at the far edge
• A Single Programming Model for the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum
  • Akka single Programming Model keeps the code, the tools, the patterns, and the communication the same, regardless if it is Cloud, Edge, or in between
  • Seamless Integration - works at the Edge or in the Cluster automatically
• Empowering New Innovation
  • Active/Active digital twins, and many other new use-cases
  • No dealing with complicated logic to handle network segregation
  • Focus on business logic and flow (not on tool integrations)

Akka’s new cloud-to-edge capabilities are available today. Interested parties can get a glimpse of what’s coming next in Lightbend CEO Jonas Bonér’s latest blog post here.