Apache Pekko is a fork of Akka 2.6.2 originally released in September 2022. It is a member project of the Apache Software Foundation and licensed as Apache v2.

Apache Pekko released version 1.0 on July 13, 2023. Pekko does not provide a compatibility and interoperability policy statement between Akka and Pekko for SDKs, binaries, or modules. Pekko has stated that Akka and Pekko nodes are not able to form clusters together.

Lightbend provides commercial support for Pekko v1.0.x through Akka migrations. We are not aware of other commercial software vendors providing a Pekko support commitment.

For more information, please contact us.

Standards Compliance

Lightbend has been audited and attested to be SOC 2 and NIST CSF compliant. Open source and forked versions before Akka 23.05 are not SOC 2 compliant. Organizations that require compliance with SOC 2, NIST CSF, or ISO 27001 can migrate from Pekko v1.0 to Akka by obtaining a Lightbend subscription.

Migration Compatibility

Pekko has made commits for their upcoming 1.1 release which breaks API compatibility that could make migrations to Akka difficult. Lightbend will periodically review Pekko SDK additions for incorporation to work around any incompatibilities.

  Pekko 1.0 Akka 22.10 Akka 23.05 Akka 23.10 Akka 24.05 Akka 3
Release Date July 13, 2023 October 26, 2022 May 16, 2023 October 31, 2023 May 22, 2024 Nov 4th, 2024
Bugs Fixed 10 16 17 10 2 TBD
Indemnified CVEs N/A 16 7 10 3 TBD
Compliance N/A N/A SOC 2 SOC 2 SOC2, NIST CSF SOC2, NIST CSF
Features Added Release Notes
  • Brokerless messaging
  • Projections over gRPC
  • Persistence plugin for Postgres and Yugabyte
  • Java 17 support
  • Scala 3.1 support
  • More in Release Notes
  • Akka Distributed Clustering
  • Active-Active clustering
  • Replicated event sourcing
  • Rolling updates in Kubernetes
  • Sharded daemon scaling
  • Thread starvation detector
  • More in Release Notes
  • Akka Edge
  • Scaling to zero
  • GraalVM native image
  • Lightweight Kubernetes support
  • In-memory database support via H2
  • Starting projection from snapshot
  • Scalability for projections
  • More in Release Notes
  • Java 21 support
  • Zero Trust security
  • NIST CSF compliance
  • Database sharding for cost-effective scale out
  • GraalVM native image support
  • Rust language support for edge devices
  • More in Release Notes
 TBD
Apache v2 Date* July 13, 2023 October 26, 2025 May 16, 2026 October 31, 2026 May 22, 2027 Nov 4th, 2024