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Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas Hazrati

Inphina Technologies

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what?

Platform for next generation, event driven, scalable and fault tolerant architectures on the

JVM.

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akka

A actor-based concurrency framework

Provides solutions for non blocking concurrency

Written in Scala, also works in Java

Open source

Now at 1.3-RC2 (to be released this weekend)

Lead developer and founder: Jonas Boner

JRockit, AspectWerkz, AspectJ, Terracotta

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issues

concurrency

scalability

fault tolerance

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why akka

simpler concurrency

event driven

scale up or scale out

fault tolerance

remoting

scala and java api

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aha actors!

message-Passing Concurrency

share NOTHING

isolated lightweight processes

communicates through messages

asynchronous and non-blocking

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actors

defined in the 1973 paper by Carl Hewitt

popularized by Erlang

alleviates the dev

from explicit locking

and thread management

easy to write concurrent and parallel systems

actors like objects BUT dont share state

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actor models

Thread-based

Event-based• Very lightweight

• can easily create millions on a single

workstation

(6.5 million on 4 G RAM)

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defining an actor

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firing messages

bang bang bang

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send anything

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fault tolerance

let it crash

linked set of actors

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all for one

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one for one

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supervisor hierarchies

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fault management

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other concepts

Remote Actors

Akka STM

Akka Serialization

Persistence

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problem statement

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considerations

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hmm...

STM – X

Serialization – X

Persistence – X

Remoting – ?/X

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issues

maxing out on the os threads

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dispatchers

thread based – dedicated os thread bound

event based – backed by pool of threads

priority event based

work stealing

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ala carte'

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used in ...

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more information

http://akka.io/docs/akka/1.3-RC1/intro

http://thoughts.inphina.com/tag/akka/

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Everyone ! “Thanks”

vhazrati@inphina.com@vhazrati