Scalable Applications with Akka

Historically writing correct concurrent, scalable and fault-tolerant applications has been very hard. Akka is an attempt to simplify writing concurrent, scalable and highly available software for the JVM. Akka has an API both for Scala and Java. Akka uses the Actor Model together with Software Transactional Memory (STM) to raise the abstraction level. For fault-tolerance it adopts the “Let it crash” model which help in building self healing always on systems.

The presentation walks through the Akka features for building a web scale system. We would look at a real world case study in which Inphina developed a web scale framework using Akka which is capable of processing 150 million streaming messages a day. We would discuss the architecture and key design decisions.

Takeaways would include an understanding of Akka, its features which would help in developing a scalable system, potential architecture and pitfalls to be cautious about.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka was presented at 6th Annual IndicThreads.com Conference On Java, December 2011, Pune, India.  Presentation – Slides

Speaker:

Vikas Hazrati is the co-founder and software craftsman at Inphina. In his 15+ years of experience he has become a recognized speaker, mentor, and practitioner in the software industry. Vikas is a technologist at heart and is never too far away from the keyboard. He blogs, has presented at various Technology conferences and written articles on Software development on ‘Agile Journal’ and ‘The Server Side’. He is an Agile Editor on InfoQ.com where he posts weekly about the latest and greatest in the community. Vikas has a Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani, B.Tech in Computer Engineering and a degree in Business Administration. He has worked with several big system integrators like IBM, Mastek and Sapient. He was the driving force behind two startups Solutions Inc. and Xebia India which went on to become successful in their respective domains.

Next: IndicThreads.com Conference On Software Development, Delhi, India