Lightbend has announced a new version of Akka, its platform for building responsive distributed apps.
Akka 3 has been in development since 2018, according to the company, and it utilizes many other Lightbend projects, such as Lagom, Play Framework, Cloudstate, Cloudflow, Akka Streams, and Kalix.
There are three main themes in the Akka 3 release. First, it has multi-master replication, which allows a single entity to have instances running in multiple locations. This is achieved by using replicated event logging, CRDTs, and a protocol that runs on gRPC to guarantee delivery of events.
Second, and building on top of multi-master replication, developers can migrate apps to different clouds without downtime or disruption. “These features also mean that operations can do upgrades of the application, individual services, or data model without any disruption,” Jonas Bonér, founder and CTO of Lightstep, wrote in a post.
And finally, Akka 3 also has an app resilience guarantee where Lightstep will pay customers for any losses incurred by app downtime. “It’s part of the SLA you get, which means that it’s on us to worry about. We can confidently do this: Akka apps have never had a Sev1 due to Akka. It’s rock solid and hardened,” said Bonér.
In addition to this release, the company also announced some major brand changes. It is unifying its entire portfolio into Akka, and is changing its name from Lightbend to Akka to reflect this change.
According to the company, Kalix.io and Lightbend.com will be retired, but all existing customer services will continue working uninterrupted.
“The Akka libraries that you have used over the last 15 years are also included in the new Akka, will always be a part of Akka, and will indefinitely have new feature investments. The Akka libraries are foundational to our company, our business, and our products,” Tyler Jewell, CEO of the company, wrote in a post.
The company is also hosting a webinar next Wednesday, November 20th at 11 AM ET to go through the changes in Akka 3.