In its latest rendition, Lightbend’s Akka distributed computing platform features a programming model enabling developers to build a cloud-native application once and have it work across both edge and cloud environments.
Called Akka Edge, the model eliminates high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers posed by edge computing, Lightbend said on October 31. Developers can focus on business logic instead of time-consuming tool integrations and no longer have to use different solutions for the cloud and edge. Akka Edge provides a single programming model, runtime, and data fabric for the cloud-to-edge continuum. Akka utilizes an actor model for writing a service once and having it run anywhere from centralized cloud out to devices.
Supporting JVM-based Java and Scala languages, Akka enables the development of reactive, event-driven systems that utilize the cloud. Akka features a set of libraries for designing scalable systems spanning processor cores and networks. Microservices are deployed with support for large-scale application deployment. Multithreaded behavior is provided without the use of low-level concurrency constructs such as locks or atomics, relieving users from dealing with memory issues.
Specific capabilities in the latest version of Akka include support for more-constrained environments, such as running with GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions, and Active/Active digital twins and other use cases. Akka also offers adaptive data availability, with projections over gRPC for:
- The edge
- Scalability and efficiency improvements
- Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
- Temporal, geographic, and usage-based migration
Instructions on getting started with Akka can be found at akka.io.
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