Lightbend launches Akka Distributed Cluster for next-gen edge computing across multiple data centers

Akka 23.05 enables businesses to expand cloud native applications across multiple data centers while maintaining performance, consistency, and reliability—whether multi-region, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premise.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 16, 2023 – Lightbend, the company providing cloud-native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, today announced the launch of Akka Distributed Cluster (Akka v.23.05), which brings innovative new capabilities for accelerating data delivery to users; maintaining application availability even in the event of a cloud provider outage; cutting costs by minimizing data storage expenses and reducing server data traffic; and conserving developer time. These new features, combined with Akka, one of the most powerful platforms for distributed computing, give enterprises the ability to build mission-critical cloud native applications in less time than ever.

“I have long maintained that the demarcation between ‘cloud’ and ‘edge’ is not a clear boundary, but a spectrum of environments based on the specific requirements of the application use case,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “Akka Distributed Cluster brings industry-first capabilities that blur the distinctions between cloud and edge and continue our progress in building a new paradigm for tomorrow’s cloud-to-edge continuum.”

Akka Distributed Cluster is comprised of the following:

• Brokerless Pub/Sub—Experience low-latency, high-performance Publish-Subscribe over gRPC, with guaranteed delivery, eliminating the need for message broker management. This ensures efficient operation in memory-constrained environments, from the central Cloud to the Far Edge.
• Brokerless Pub/Sub Event Filtering—Building on Brokerless Pub/Sub, this enhancement allows dynamic event filters on the producer or consumer side to prevent sending and processing unnecessary data. Consequently, network costs are reduced, and hardware resources are freed up by only transferring the required data when needed. This feature is particularly crucial at the Edge.
• Active-Active Event Sourcing—Utilize distributed event journal replication—running on gRPC, leveraging CRDTs, and the new Brokerless Pub/Sub for ultra-efficient, low-latency replication. This guarantees eventual solid consistency of event-sourced actors/entities across different data centers or Point-of-Presences at the Far Edge.
• Durable State Queries—Search for data on multiple fields without additional read models, reducing the cost and time spent storing and interacting with duplicate data.

These new capabilities enable Akka Distributed Cluster to maximize cloud capabilities, ensuring efficiency, correctness, and resilience. Lightbend will continue to build new capabilities into Akka that will push the boundaries of what’s possible with distributed computing. Interested parties can get a glimpse of what’s coming next in Lightbend CEO Jonas Bonér’s latest blog post here.