Applied Akka Patterns: A Hands-On Guide to Designing Distributed Applications

Michael Nash · Wade Waldron

Dec 2016 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

When it comes to big data processing, we can no longer ignore concurrency or try to add it in after the fact. Fortunately, the solution is not a new paradigm of development, but rather an old one. With this hands-on guide, Java and Scala developers will learn how to embrace concurrent and distributed applications with the open source Akka toolkit. You’ll learn how to put the actor model and its associated patterns to immediate and practical use.

Throughout the book, you’ll deal with an analogous workforce problem: how to schedule a group of people across a variety of projects while optimizing their time and skillsets. This example will help you understand how Akka uses actors, streams, and other tools to stitch your application together.

• Model software that reflects the real world with domain-driven design
• Learn principles and practices for implementing individual actors
• Unlock the real potential of Akka with patterns for combining multiple actors
• Understand the consistency tradeoffs in a distributed system
• Use several Akka methods for isolating and dealing with failures
• Explore ways to build systems that support availability and scalability
• Tune your Akka application for performance with JVM tools and dispatchers

About the author

Michael Nash is director of capabilities at Lightbend. For over thirty years, he has designed, developed, shipped and consulted on software development projects for clients of all shapes and sizes. As an advocate for software craftsmanship with expertise in project management and architecture, he was amongst the earliest of adopters of the Typesafe stack, with over 5 years experience working with Scala, Akka and Spray. He dedicates the majority of his spare time to working in the Typesafe Reactive Platform, speaking at conferences and writing books on the software business.

Wade Waldron is a senior consultant at Lightbend, where he works with clients to provide knowledge and expertise on the Typesafe Reactive Platform. Outside of Lightbend, he has spent the last 9 years building rock solid software and games, with a strong focus on test driven design, domain driven design, service oriented architecture, event driven architecture and agile development.