Analyst(s): Alastair Cooke
Publication Date: December 19, 2024
LightBend consolidated its products into version three of the Akka framework and renamed the business Akka. Akka 3 adds a robust SDK and multi-writer database for building resilient cloud applications that span multiple regions or cloud providers. Akka provides a Platform as a Service with contracted application availability and performance. Resilient geo-distributed applications are now easier to build and operate.
What is Covered in this Article:
- The company Lightbend is now doing business as Akka.
- Version 3 of Akka simplifies the development and operation of resilient geo-distributed applications.
- The new Akka SDK simplifies building highly available distributed applications across multiple clouds and regions.
- A multi-writer database within Akka allows high availability and disaster recovery for distributed applications.
The News: LightBend consolidated its products into version 3 of the Akka framework and renamed the business Akka. Akka 3 adds a robust SDK and multi-writer database for building resilient cloud applications that span multiple regions or cloud providers. Akka provides a Platform as a Service with contracted application availability and performance.
Lightbend Becomes Akka and Akka V3 Enables Resilient Geo-Distributed Applications
Analyst Take: Building a geo-distributed application is complex. In particular, ensuring data is synchronised around the globe without compromising responsiveness is challenging. The Akka framework is a popular set of libraries that make building scalable and resilient applications more straightforward, although still complex. The release of Akka V3 adds a Software Development Kit (SDK) to the libraries, allowing faster developer on-boarding and easier application development. The addition of multi-writer database capabilities enables load sharing and failover between regions and clouds. Akka manages much of the underlying complexity of containers and Kubernetes in the PaaS.
Akka (the company) is confident in the Akka platform; customers can get a contracted service level and performance for their application. Tyler Jewel, the CEO at Akka, stated that no customer had ever had a severity incident attributable to the Akka framework. I don’t doubt the confidence; I would also be interested in hearing the same statements from some of the thirty-eight thousand commercial users of Akka. The Akka framework has been around for fifteen years, with the original developer, Jonas Boner, now the CTO at Akka company. The length of history and large number of commercial users support the CEO’s assertion.
The new SDK for Akka wraps around the libraries and provides six essential object types for building a resilient distributed application. The libraries are known for being powerful and flexible but require an experienced developer and some learning time. The SDK provides language-native objects with opinionated configurations. The opinionated nature of these SDK objects allows more straightforward development without losing the power of the underlying libraries. Using these objects will bring more consistency to the applications built with Akka, and it will also help ongoing support through this consistency.
Failure modes are always crucial in large distributed applications. Akka 3 added support for having multiple writable copies of the database distributed across different cloud provider locations or cloud providers. The capability allows a large-scale, high-performance distributed application to run in an active-active configuration with load sharing for high availability and disaster recovery. Other products might only offer a single writable copy of the database, with other locations read-only and failover requiring a read-only copy to be promoted to read-write. A geo-distributed writable database allows consistent performance for users who are similarly dispersed around the world.
The details of the Akka V3 release are in this blog post by the founder. The rebranding from Lightbend to Akka is in this blog post by the CTO.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
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Practical, High Availability Strategies for Regulated Industries
Author Information
Alastair has made a twenty-year career out of helping people understand complex IT infrastructure and how to build solutions that fulfil business needs. Much of his career has included teaching official training courses for vendors, including HPE, VMware, and AWS. Alastair has written hundreds of analyst articles and papers exploring products and topics around on-premises infrastructure and virtualization and getting the most out of public cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Alastair has also been involved in community-driven, practitioner-led education through the vBrownBag podcast and the vBrownBag TechTalks.
