Akka 24.05 released

Traditionally, systems have been protected at their perimeter, using firewalls to protect the network, and with internal systems having no means to be accessed from the outside world. Security in these setups relies on the perimeter security, and trusts things that happen inside the perimeter, such as trusting requests between services, trusting the integrity of long lived credentials, and trusting that an internal service will only access the data that it needs.

This system of trust doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in modern systems, where network configurations use complex cloud based VPS solutions, and services number in the hundreds or thousands. It can be difficult to get a holistic understanding of the entire surface area of attack for the system, and so just trusting the perimeter leaves the system vulnerable to many types of attacks, including exploiting configuration errors and escalation of exploiting parts of the system.

To combat this, an alternative approach to security architecture, called Zero Trust, is necessary. Zero trust systems assume that perimeter security measures have been breached. Note that this does not mean they have no perimeter security. Rather, services in the system use additional layers of security to ensure that in the event that perimeter security is breached, the breach can be contained.

Learn how to build Zero Trust systems with Akka.

Using a single non-distributed database can become a bottleneck for applications that have high throughput requirements. We have added the capability to [spread the data and load over many physical backend databases](https://doc.akka.io/libraries/akka-persistence-r2dbc/current/data-partition.html). It doesn’t require any partitioning or sharding support from the database itself so ordinary cost-efficient non-distributed databases can still be used.

Akka is now certified for Java 21, which gives access to useful Java language features such as deconstruction of records and pattern matching for switch statements.

Java records and pattern matching allow for more concise use of Akka’s APIs. The tutorial "Implementing Microservices with Akka" now uses Java 21 syntax in its code examples.

Refer to Certified Java versions for other Java versions that are known to work well with Akka.

We are devoted to the Cloud to Edge continuum and continue bringing features useful for Akka use at the edge of the cloud, enhancing Akka Edge.

A major leap for Akka is the new capability to use Akka concepts outside the JVM with Akka Edge Rust!

Our recommended blueprint for building resilient and scalable microservices with Akka has been reworked to show the use of the many feature improvements in Akka from the recent releases. This now shows how point-to-point use of Kafka can be replaced with Akka Projection over gRPC to achieve "Service-to-service eventing." Furthermore, it now builds on Akka Persistence R2DBC and the Java examples now use Java 21 syntax with records and pattern matching: [Implementing Microservices with Akka](https://doc.akka.io/guide/microservices-tutorial/index.html)

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.

The following CVE’s are addressed in this build.

With the latest release 2.20.x of Lightbend Telemetry (Cinnamon) the following highlights have been published:

All modules of Akka 24.05 are backwards compatible with Akka 23.10. No configuration changes are needed. Rolling update of Akka Cluster is fully supported.

The Akka Discovery implementation akka-discovery-consul has been removed due to lack of maintenance in upstream dependencies, which have identified vulnerabilities.

Akka licensing and support options are available from Lightbend.

Happy hakking!

– The Akka Team