Lightbend, Inc., the company providing cloud-native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, is debuting its latest release of Akka, the toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications for Java and Scala. This new version features a unique programming model designed to empower developers to build applications only once—and have it function across both cloud and edge environments.
With edge and cloud environments continuously growing in utility and necessity, developers are left to contend with a variety of tools and solutions to individually build apps suited for these environments, according to Lightbend. These disparate solutions lead to a plethora of inefficiencies, ultimately decreasing innovation and opportunity for developers.
This gap in efficiency has led to enhancing Akka, a solution engineered to deliver a model that enables the accelerated building of a single cloud native app for both cloud and edge environments.
“Today, applications developed for cloud native environments are generally not well-suited to the edge and vice versa,” said Jonas Bonér, founder and CEO of Lightbend. “This has always struck me as counter-productive, as both architectures lean heavily on one another to be successful. As the line between cloud and edge environments continues to blur, Akka Edge brings industry-first capabilities to enable developers to build once for the cloud and, when ready, deploy seamlessly to the edge.”
Akka’s singular programming model eradicates the operational barriers that accommodating edge and cloud environments introduce—including high latency, large footprints, and complexity obstacles. This unique approach enables Akka to keep the code, tools, patterns, and communications the same across cloud and edge environments, enhancing developer productivity and efficiency.
The latest updates to Akka range from adaptive data availability to efficient running in resource-constrained environments and accommodation for the cloud-to-edge continuum.
These include:
- Projections over gRPC for the edge
- Scalability and efficiency improvements
- Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
- Temporal, geographic, and use-based migration
- Support for GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions
- Support for multidimensional autoscaling and scale to near zero
- Lightweight storage
- Seamless integration
With Akka, developers can explore a variety of new use cases—including Active/Active digital twins—and are alleviated from dealing with complex logic to handle network segregation. Instead, developers can focus on business logic and flow, not on tedious tool integrations.
“Akka has been a powerful enabling technology for us to build high-performance cloud systems for our clients,” said Jean-Philippe Le Roux, CEO of Reflek.io, an innovative company delivering Digital Twin technologies to geo-distributed companies. “We have been able to dramatically speed our time-to-production by building a single solution for both cloud and edge with Akka.”
To learn more about the latest version of Akka, please visit https://www.lightbend.com/.