Lightbend, the company behind Akka, has released Akka version 24.05. Lightbend produces cloud-native microservices frameworks while Akka allows for building distributed applications.

The updated version of Akka has better performance, security and compliance including Zero Trust compliance support, alongside database sharding, Java 21 support, and Rust support.

The updated security and compliance features have enabled Lightbend and Akka to pass audits and be attested to be SOC 2 and NIST SF 800 compliant. Lightbend is also offering guidelines on how users can attest to their Akka distributed applications being ZeroTrust compliant.

The performance improvements come through the addition of support for database sharding, meaning data and load can be spread over many physical backend databases. The Akka team says it doesn't require any partitioning or sharding support from the database itself so ordinary cost-efficient non-distributed databases can still be used. This means Akka can be horizontally scaled out, avoiding the need for a high-performance, centralized database.

The new version also has improved options for using Akka for edge computing, where Rust is widely used, meaning Akka services can be deployed on devices with minimal footprint and compute requirements. Akka Edge support is a subset of Akka implemented with the Rust language. Other improvements include active-active entities in Akka Edge, adding support for Replicated Event Sourcing for entities that can be updated in more than one geographical location; and the ability to replicate state changes of Durable State entities in Akka Edge and Akka Distributed Cluster.

Akka also now has new directives in Akka HTTP in the form of cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), a mechanism that allows a webpage to access restricted resources from a server on a domain different than the domain that served the web page. Akka HTTP now provides directives for CORS out of the box.

JSON Web Tokens (JWT) provides a way to define fine grained access control for resources. Akka HTTP now provides a JWT directive to verify and extract claims to decide if a certain request should be allowed or not.

Akka is now certified for Java 21, so developers can use Java language features such as deconstruction of records and pattern matching for switch statements. The team says Java records and pattern matching allow for more concise use of Akka's APIs.

There's also now built-in support for GraalVM native images. GraalVM Native Image compiles Java or Scala code ahead-of-time to a native executable, improving Akka Edge deployments in resource-constrained environments.

Akka 24.05 is available now.

More Information

Live Walkthrough of Akka 24.05

Lightbend Website

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