One of the best features of Akka is Akka Cluster. Akka cluster allows for building distributed applications, where one application or service spans multiple nodes. From its initial release in 2013, Akka Cluster needed a node management system to manage the Akka nodes and to provide resilience and elasticity. With Kubernetes Akka finally has a node management system. Akka Cluster has been designed to gracefully handle nodes leaving and joining a running cluster while continuing to run. Kubernetes adds and removes nodes as needed to increase capacity or to recover from failures. In effect, there is a perfect symbiosis between Akka Cluster and Kubernetes. In this talk, we will look at and demonstrate how Akka Cluster and Kubernetes work together and how together they form a beautiful relationship.
Hugh McKee is a developer advocate at Lightbend. He has had a long career building applications that evolved slowly, that inefficiently utilized their infrastructure, and that was brittle and prone to failure. That all changed when we started building reactive, asynchronous, actor-based systems. This radically new way of building applications rocked his world. As an added benefit, building application systems became way more fun than it had ever been. Now he is focused on helping others to discover the significant advantages and joys of building responsive, resilient, elastic, message-driven applications.
