Engineering the Future of Software
29–31 Oct 2018: Tutorials & Conference
31 Oct–1 Nov 2018: Training
London, UK

Akka Cluster versus Kubernetes: A clustering solutions showdown

Adam Sandor (Container Solutions), Fabio Tiriticco (Fabway)
14:1515:05 Monday, 29 October 2018
Distributed systems
Location: Buckingham Room - Palace Suite
Secondary topics:  Framework-focused, Theoretical
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 6 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Software architects and senior developers

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Experience building distributed systems using either Akka or Kubernetes (or similar container orchestration technology)

What you'll learn

  • Explore both Kubernetes and Akka
  • Understand when to use one or both of these technologies in your projects

Description

Kubernetes is on a steady march toward becoming the world’s commodity platform to run distributed services. It orchestrates applications packaged as Docker containers, which makes it more versatile than platforms bound to a single technology stack. Despite being technologically agnostic, it offers a great deal of control, implementing different distributed patterns.

Akka is the most popular toolkit to distribute JVM applications. Architectures based on the actor model enable location transparency, asynchronous messaging, and the “share nothing” approach, which leads to seamless scalability from day one. Akka’s clustering module ties nodes together, which in turn run actors. This is very similar to how Kubernetes gathers nodes into a cluster and runs containers on top of it. Akka Cluster however has no control over resource allocation, isolation, or provisioning.

Join Adam Sandor and Fabio Tiriticco, experts in Akka and Kubernetes, to see whose favorite technology is better suited for building modern distributed applications. Is Kubernetes the end of Akka Cluster? Does Akka Cluster offer more to JVM-based applications than Kubernetes does, or is there a reason for their friendly coexistence?

Adam and Fabio explore different patterns for using Kubernetes together with or in place of Akka Cluster, detailing the pros and cons of each approach to guide you in navigating the conflicting and overlapping aspects of the two technologies. These patterns include running an Akka Cluster on top of Kubernetes with a fixed set of nodes, integrating Akka Cluster with Kubernetes to provide dynamic resource allocation based on internal Akka Cluster metrics, distributing an Akka actor system purely using Kubernetes, and microservices on Kubernetes without using Akka. Along the way, Adam and Fabio share their research into these patterns, along with working examples. The code will be made available publicly on GitHub.

Photo of Adam Sandor

Adam Sandor

Container Solutions

Adam Sandor is a senior cloud native engineer at Container Solutions. With a background in enterprise Java development, he’s passionate about using cloud native to create better DevOps processes. His experience includes building a CI/CD platform for tens of development teams at FiduciaGAD.

Photo of Fabio Tiriticco

Fabio Tiriticco

Fabway

Fabio Tiriticco is a tech lead, reactive architect, and Scala developer. A community guy at heart, he’s the organizer of the Reactive Amsterdam meetup. In his free time, he does long-distance bicycle touring and fingerpicks the guitar.

Comments on this page are now closed.

Comments

۞չՅֆսֆ ժօլքՏժա |
2/11/2018 18:20 GMT

Any way to view the conference online?