Lightbend, the inventors of the Akka distributed application platform, is unveiling the latest iteration of Akka, offering a myriad of new capabilities in the realms of security and compliance, performance, edge computing, and ecosystem support. Akka 24.05’s updates—fueled by customer feedback and market trends—aim to make building systems that take full advantage of the cloud and edge easier and more cost effective than ever, according to Lightbend.
Akka is a toolkit and distributed application platform that delivers a singular programming model to take data and logic closer to the user while simultaneously providing high resilience and low latency, explained Tyler Jewell, CEO of Lightbend. This empowers enterprises to build highly distributed, multi-cloud applications by eliminating complexity barriers associated with the cloud and edge. With Akka, organizations can harness, distribute, and fully utilize large quantities of intelligent data—regardless of where it’s generated—to enhance their operations.
“Akka allows enterprises to build reactive event-driven systems that take full advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud and are resilient to failure, highly efficient, and operative at any scale,” said Jewell.
Regarding security and compliance, Lightbend and Akka have undergone SOC 2 and NIST SF 800 certification, now compliant with both regulations. The latest version of Akka also offers new guidelines and architecture support that allow customers to ensure that their Akka distributed apps are Zero Trust compliant.
“We spent several months researching what it means to build a bulletproof Zero Trust system based on Akka,” explained Jewell. “Our customers can now supplement their perimeter defenses with robust, multi-layered security measures designed to detect, isolate, and neutralize threats, ensuring that any breach does not lead to a systemic crisis.”
“These systems are difficult to build, but we have done the hard work, making it easy to navigate the complexities of creating such a system. The new features and architecture support for Zero Trust also enable our customers to build systems in Akka that more easily meet the requirements of SOC 2, ISO 27001, and the NIST SP 800 family of standards,” Jewell continued.
Akka 24.05 enhances performance through the introduction of Database Sharding, a capability that enables near-infinity horizontal scale out of database persistence. This feature reduces the costs of implementing a high-performance, centralized database while streamlining the overall architecture and reducing the operational burden of IT, according to Lightbend.
“Akka has always been extremely good at managing distributed data reliably at scale with remarkably consistent low latency. It’s been a differentiator for Akka, and now with Database Sharding, we’re enabling near-infinite horizontal scale out of database persistence,” said Jewell.
Edge computing becomes even simpler in the latest iteration of Akka, now supporting the Rust programming language—an extremely popular language for edge computing. This allows for Akka services to be deployed on devices with little footprint and compute requirements, according to the company.
“A significant leap forward for Akka is the new capability to use Akka concepts outside the JVM with the latest library called Akka Edge Rust,” said Jewell. “It’s a subset of Akka implemented with the Rust programming language extending Akka edge capabilities to run Akka apps even closer to where they are used and where the user’s data resides, including devices. Running Akka at the edge, end users receive deterministic low latency regardless of the number of users, their location, network connectivity, or volume of data.”
Greater ecosystem support in Akka 24.05 takes shape in support for Java 21, ultimately limiting the amount of code developers need to write and reducing the likelihood of developer mistakes.
To learn more about Lightbend and Akka, please visit https://www.lightbend.com/.