Lightbend has updated Akka, its distributed computing platform, with a new programming model that enables developers to create applications that are platform agnostic to work across cloud and edge environments. Lightbend specializes in cloud-native microservices frameworks.

The changes to Akka are designed to overcome the problem of having to use different tools when building for the cloud and edge. Akka now has a model that allows teams to build a single cloud native application for both cloud and edge environments. Lightbend describes Akka Edge as a single programming model, runtime, and data fabric for and across the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum. Akka Edge uses the actor model, so developers can write a service once and run it anywhere, from the centralized cloud all the way out to the devices.

Lightbend says Akka's programming model is designed to eliminate the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers the edge has posed for development teams wanting to bridge the edge and cloud.

The model allows developers to focus on business logic rather than tool integrations, so businesses can make use of their data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated.

Jonas Bonér, founder and CEO of Lightbend said that applications developed for cloud native environments are generally not well-suited to the edge and vice versa.

"This has always struck me as counter-productive, as both architectures lean heavily on one another to be successful. As the line between cloud and edge environments continues to blur, Akka Edge brings industry-first capabilities to enable developers to build once for the Cloud and, when ready, deploy seamlessly to the Edge.”  

Akka now includes projections over gRPC for the edge for asynchronous, brokerless service-to-service communication. It also has scalability and efficiency improvements to handle the large scale of many edge services.

The software is designed to run efficiently in resource constrained environments, such as running with GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions. It has support for multidimensional autoscaling and will scale to near zero. It also has lightweight storage, for running durable actors at the far edge.

Akka's single programming model keeps the code, the tools, the patterns, and the communication the same, regardless if it is for cloud, edge, or in between.

Other features include support for Active/Active digital twins, and other new cloud-edge models. The developer doesn't need to deal with the logic of network segregation, and can focus on the business logic and flow. Akka's new cloud-to-edge capabilities are available now.

More Information

Lightbend Website

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