What is Akka?¶
Simpler Scalability, Fault-Tolerance, Concurrency & Remoting through Actors
We believe that writing correct concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications is too hard. Most of the time it’s because we are using the wrong tools and the wrong level of abstraction. Akka is here to change that. Using the Actor Model together with Software Transactional Memory we raise the abstraction level and provide a better platform to build correct concurrent and scalable applications. For fault-tolerance we adopt the Let it crash/Embrace failure model which have been used with great success in the telecom industry to build applications that self-heals, systems that never stop. Actors also provides the abstraction for transparent distribution and the basis for truly scalable and fault-tolerant applications. Akka is Open Source and available under the Apache 2 License.
Download from https://akka.io/downloads/
Akka implements a unique hybrid¶
- Actors (Java), which gives you:
- Simple and high-level abstractions for concurrency and parallelism.
- Asynchronous, non-blocking and highly performant event-driven programming model.
- Very lightweight event-driven processes (create ~6.5 million actors on 4GB RAM).
- Fault Tolerance Through Supervisor Hierarchies (Java) through supervisor hierarchies with “let-it-crash” semantics. Excellent for writing highly fault-tolerant systems that never stop, systems that self-heal.
- Software Transactional Memory (Java) (STM). (Distributed transactions coming soon).
- Transactors (Java): combine actors and STM into transactional actors. Allows you to compose atomic message flows with automatic retry and rollback.
- Remote Actors (Java): highly performant distributed actors with remote supervision and error management.
- Java API and Scala API
Akka can be used in two different ways¶
- As a library: used by a web app, to be put into ‘WEB-INF/lib’ or as a regular JAR on your classpath.
- As a microkernel: stand-alone kernel, embedding a servlet container and all the other modules.
See the Use-case and Deployment Scenarios for details.