Dear hakkers,

We are excited to announce a new patch release of Akka 2.6. Notable changes relative to 2.6.8 include:

• Replicated Event Sourcing a.k.a Multi-DC persistence. See below. #29217
• Chunked messages in reliable delivery. Large messages sent over reliable delivery can now be chunked automatically into smaller ones. #29560
• Embed types in Jackson that have existing Akka serializers.
• Improve Shard#entityCreated API performance. #29520 thanks to @mgutmanis

As well as some important bug fixes:

• EventSourcedBehavior un-stash causes unbounded recursion and JVM StackOverflow exceptions. #29401
• Noisy logs from sharding. #29400

2.6.9 includes 81 closed issues. The complete list can be found on the 2.6.9 milestone on github.

Replicated Event Sourcing

Earlier in the year Lightbend announced the open sourcing of two key commercial features: Split brain resolver and Multi-DC persistence. Rather than open sourcing the existing Multi-DC persistence library we have instead integrated the same functionality in to Akka 2.6’s event sourcing APIs. This is part of a larger effort to unify event sourcing APIs across Akka, Multi-DC persistence, and Lagom. In addition, we’ve added support for running multiple replicas in the same DC and for all databases that have a persistence plugin that supports metadata. Shortly releases of the Apache Cassandra and Google Spanner plugins will have this support added. JDBC has support when not using snapshots and support for snapshots will be added shortly.

This means that replicated event sourcing supports cross datacenter replication without any special support from the database. Meaning that active-active event sourcing can be achieved even when there is no inter-dc replication at the database level e.g. independent relation databases per datacenter.

We’ve released a video describing Replicated Event Sourcing.

Credits

For this release we had the help of 22 committers – thank you all very much!

commits  added  removed
     32  15871     1218 Christopher Batey
     26   3946     1427 Patrik Nordwall
     24   9394     2578 Johan Andrén
      6    926      637 Arnout Engelen
      5    660       85 Ignasi Marimon-Clos
      3     23        2 Enno
      3     13        8 yiksanchan
      2     15        6 Johannes Rudolph
      2      7        2 Josep Prat
      2      3        3 Łukasz Drygała
      1     87        4 Joel Wee
      1     67       10 Chiyu Zhong
      1     60        4 Renato Cavalcanti
      1     61        1 Peter Vlugter
      1     36        1 Yufei Cai
      1     19        2 Andrii
      1      4        6 Aleh Reishal
      1      3        1 mgutmanis
      1      1        1 Hugh McKee
      1      1        1 Patrick Altaie
      1      1        1 ohze.net
      1      1        1 James Mulcahy

Lightbend employs the Akka core team. If you’re looking to take your Akka systems to the next level, let’s set up a time to discuss our enterprise-grade expert support, self-paced education courses, and technology enhancements that help you manage, monitor and secure your Akka systems - from development to production.

Happy hakking!

– The Akka Team