Lightbend’s Latest Akka Iteration Supercharges Simplicity and Elasticity with Several Industry-Firsts

Lightbend, the company behind Akka, is debuting Akka 3, delivering a series of new enhancements and industry-firsts that solidify Akka as a platform for building and running apps centered on elasticity, agility, and resiliency. Between a new SDK for development, Serverless and Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) environments, migration and replication achievements, and more, Lightbend—which has now rebranded as Akka—forwards simplicity and innovation in its  latest release. 

At its core, Akka is designed to enable developers to program multi-core, multi-threaded systems—which offers a significant advantage in the world of microservices and distributed systems. Despite its potential, Akka had a steep learning curve, as well as introduced difficulties in creating hosting environments due to the unique behavioral footprints that each application built with Akka maintained. 

Propelled by these bottlenecks, Akka 3 is a reinvention of the Akka platform, aiming to drive simplicity in application development as well as offer built-in elasticity, agility, and resilience. Now, regardless of their programming language, developers can get started working with Akka in under a day with its new developer SDK, drastically improving onboarding. 

Additionally, Akka’s new heavily opinionated approach embeds guardrails within each application to drive elasticity, agility, and resilience without the need for developer configurations. 

“The most exciting part is how simple it is for anybody to get started with this [Akka] and to become productive building systems that have generally been reserved for the Netflix's and the data dogs of the world,” said Tyler Jewell, president and CEO of Akka. “Our focus is to… make it [Akka] available to every developer who wants to be able to build an application that can scale to virtually any level of capacity.” 

Atop Akka’s new capabilities, the company is announcing the following industry-firsts:

• The first PaaS that enables application migration, automating Day 2 operations by enabling apps to be replicated across clouds, regions, and devices for no-downtime migrations, repatriation, and disaster recovery 
• The first application runtime with Multi-Master Replication, where apps acts as their own in-memory database with writable CRDT replicas running globally, decoupling the app from its underlying infrastructure and ensuring failovers do not incur wait times
• The first app resilience guarantee by indemnifying customers against losses caused by an app becoming unreliable 

“Akka has been able to achieve these firsts because, one, there's a long history of innovation that has been built into the underlying libraries. [These] sorts of innovation[s] have always been designed around the possibility of making microservices elastic in a distributed environment, and then also making it possible for them to recover themselves in that same distributed environment,” explained Jewell. “These low-level capabilities have always been enabled inside the libraries, and we've now just up-leveled them, if you will, and made them available as part of the application platform so that the applications natively take care of those properties.”