Akka aims to liberate developers to build systems that scale, are always available, and have low latency. Many people are still experiencing challenges with cloud and Akka is using a high-level programming model to abstract over those complexities. One of the key areas the company has been focusing on lately is bridging that to the edge too. Jonas Bonér, Founder and CEO at Akka, says, “We need to raise the abstraction level and have a better way of managing all the complexity that comes from the infrastructure stack.”
Over the coming year, the complexity of application infrastructure will continue to scale exponentially. Even though many products aim to alleviate some of these complexities, it can be difficult to navigate this ever-growing landscape of products. It can be daunting for people new to the cloud to understand which products to use and how to compose them into a holistic system that works. It is predicted that we will see the level of abstraction continue to be raised to help deal with the complexity.
Another trend we are likely to see in 2024 is that the boundaries between cloud and edge computing will continue to blur. During the past five years, there have been a lot of improvements in edge computing infrastructure so that you can easily deploy services running out at the edge where your customers reside. Having the data, user state and compute physically co-located will help reduce latency and mean that you can still service customers even if you lose the connection down to the backend cloud. Many customers are focusing on extending their cloud application further out to the edge and this will continue to increase in the coming year.
As we move further toward this new world of the hybrid cloud and edge, it is predicted that we will see more event-driven programming. The model is well-suited to this new world providing one-to-one mapping that makes it easier for stakeholders and everyone in the organization to understand the system. The properties also make it easy to build systems or services that are fully decoupled where you can do a lot of parallel processing. Two services do not need to be available at the same time but can coexist and talk to each other in an independent lobby.
Finding a way to liberate developers to focus on value more than infrastructure will be a key challenge in 2024. Although everyone wants to build an application as quickly as possible, they need to be able to do that predictably and reliably. Raising the abstraction level is key but also ensuring that developers have the right level of abstraction for the things that matter. Secondly, although generative AI is showing a lot of promise in revolutionizing how we build systems and how developers can bring value to their organizations, we are just at the start of exploring this potential.
Guest: Jonas Bonér (LinkedIn)
Company: Akka (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series
This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.