Akka is a toolkit developed by Typesafe and based on the Actor Model for building highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant applications on the Java Virtual Machine. We have been working together with the Google Cloud Platform team to test our Akka Cluster on Google Compute Engine. The goal was to push our toolkit to its limits and gain insight into how to scale systems on this platform. The results are jaw-dropping—reaching 2400 nodes as well as starting up a 1000 node cluster in just over four minutes. We learned in just a few minutes that Akka on Compute Engine is a great combination for elastic application deployments.
Our impression of Google Compute Engine is that everything just works, which is more than you typically expect from an IaaS. The Google Compute Engine is easy to operate and understand the tools and APIs; it features great stability, and the speed of starting new instances is outstanding, allowing us to SSH into them only 10 seconds after spawning them.
