Akka 23.05 Released

Dear hakkers,

Today we are excited to announce the availability of the Akka 23.05 release. It consists of the following modules:

Akka (core) 2.8.2
Akka HTTP 10.5.2
Akka gRPC 2.3.2
Akka Management 1.4.0
Alpakka Kafka 4.0.2
Alpakka 6.0.1
Akka Persistence R2DBC 1.1.0
Akka Persistence JDBC 5.2.1
Akka Persistence Cassandra 1.1.1
Akka Projections 1.4.0
Akka Diagnostics 2.0.0

New features

For deeper insight into some of these new features, please visit the Lightbend blog, which will be featuring a new feature weekly for the next month.

The noteworthy features are:

Akka Distributed Cluster is a set of features that will help you with stretching an Akka Cluster over geographically distributed locations, and provides asynchronous communication between different Akka Microservices without using a message broker. It comes with new features such as:
- Projections over gRPC — asynchronous brokerless service-to-service communication.
- Replicated Event Sourcing over gRPC — active-active entities.
- Dynamic event filters that can be defined on both the producer and on the consumer side, and they can be changed at runtime.
Improved rolling updates in Kubernetes by defining Pod deletion cost corresponding to Akka Cluster member age and Akka Cluster app-version from Kubernetes revision.
Dynamic scaling of number of Sharded Daemon Processes, e.g. Projection instances.
Storing a query representation of Durable State without using asynchronous Projection processing.
Store event, snapshot and durable state payloads as JSON in PostgreSQL with Akka Persistence R2DBC.
Database cleanup tool in Akka Persistence R2DBC.
mapAsyncPartitioned Streams operator
Using Akka Cluster with mTLS and rotated certificates in Kubernetes.
Scala 3 support in:
- Akka HTTP
- Akka gRPC
- Akka Management
- Akka Persistence R2DBC
- Akka Persistence Cassandra
- Akka Projections (some modules)
- Alpakka Kafka
- Alpakka (some modules)
- Akka Diagnostics
Akka Diagnostics with Thread Starvation Detector and Config Checker.
Automatic expiry of Distributed Data entries and subscribe to entries with wildcard naming. This is useful for building cache like data structures with Distributed Data.

Security Updates

We run automated security vulnerability and license policy scanning of dependencies. Several dependencies have been updated to fix security vulnerabilities and keep up with latest improvements. Security scans with several other tools have also been performed without detecting any vulnerabilities.

The following CVEs are addressed in this build.

Bug fixes

Concurrency issues in Event Sourced Behavior retention process, akka #31785
Integer overflow in Event Sourced Behavior retention, akka #31717
State consistency issue when deleting Durable State, akka #31752
Release of Kubernetes lease when used with Cluster Sharding, akka #31715
Rolling update problem with ClusterShardingHealthCheck, akka #31271
Missing event in Projection R2DBC, akka-persistence-r2dbc #371
Sharding with separate Coordinator role, akka #31637
NullPointerException in Streams shutdown, akka #30201
Race condition in Streams BroadcastHub initialization, akka #31530
Streams groupBy incorrectly failing for element on closed substream, #30205
TLS session is updated too late for TLS 1.3, akka #31419
Fix Content-Length when HTTP entity is disallowed, akka-http #4214
HTTP/2 error when parsing percent-encoded query string, akka-http #4226
HTTP/2 exception from handler, akka-http #4241
gRPC client with TLS and a custom SslContext, akka-grpc #1728

Other improvements

Kubernetes Deployment descriptors in the Akka Guide samples
gRPC mutual authentication with TLS
Recommendation to use CooperativeStickyAssignor Consumer Assignment Strategy in Alpakka Kafka
Optimizations of spawning typed actor behaviors, and typed actor memory footprint.
Sharding entity-recovery-constant-rate-strategy rate per entity type, akka #31836

Dependency updates

Jackson 2.13.5
Scala versions have been updated to 2.12.17, 2.13.17 and 3.2.2
Scala-xml 2.1.0 in builds
r2dbc-postgresql 1.0.1, including Netty 4.1.89 (CVE-2022-41915)
protobuf-java 3.21.9 (CVE-2022-3509, CVE-2022-3510, CVE-2022-3171)
kafka-clients 3.3.2
lmdbjava 0.8.3

Compatibility

Akka 2.8.x is compatible with Akka 2.7.x and 2.6.x aside from removal of two deprecated modules:

Classic Remoting transport has been deprecated since Akka 2.6.0 (2019-11-06) and is replaced by the Artery transport, which has been the default since 2.6.0 and declared ready for production in Akka 2.5.22 (2019-04-03).
OSGi packaging and support in Akka has been dropped.

By compatible, we mean:

Akka 2.8.x is binary backwards compatible with 2.7.x and 2.6.x, i.e. a library built with Akka 2.6.x can still be used with an application using Akka 2.8.x.
No configuration changes are needed for updating an application from Akka 2.6.x or 2.7.x to 2.8.x.
Rolling update of Akka Cluster from Akka 2.6.x or 2.7.x to 2.8.x is fully supported.

Other modules included in Akka 23.05 are also compatible with their previous version.

Detailed release notes:

Akka licensing and support options are available from Lightbend.

Happy hakking!

— The Akka Team