News: Akka launches new deployment options for agentic AI at scale

SAN FRANCISCO, April 30, 2025 – Akka, the leader in helping enterprises deliver distributed systems, today announced new deployment options, as well as new solutions to tackle the issues with deploying large-scale agentic AI systems. Already the standard for building elastic, agile, and resilient distributed systems, with industry leaders such as Capital One, John Deere, Tubi, Walmart, Swiggy, HPE, and many others, Akka now gives enterprises the freedom to deploy their Akka applications on the infrastructure of their choice. For the first time, enterprises have the option to self-host their application or deploy and automate operations across multiple regions on the Akka Platform. 

“Agentic AI has become a priority with enterprises everywhere as a new model that has the potential to replace enterprise software as we understand it today,” said Tyler Jewell, Akka’s CEO. “With today’s announcement, we’re making it easy for customers to build their distributed systems, including agentic AI systems, without having to commit to the Akka Platform. Now, enterprise teams can quickly build scalable systems locally and run them on any infrastructure they want.”  

Over the past 15 years, the Akka Libraries have been downloaded more than 1 billion times. In November 2024, the Akka SDK was released to further simplify the development of distributed systems, but required the Akka Platform for operations. Now, the simplicity of development with the SDK is matched by the freedom to deploy on any infrastructure. 

Today, Akka has introduced two new deployment capabilities:

• Self-managed Akka nodes - Enterprises can now run clusters of services that were built with Akka SDK on any cloud infrastructure. The new version of the Akka SDK includes a self-managed build option that will create services that can be executed stand-alone. Services are binaries packaged in Docker images that can be deployed in any container PaaS, bare metal hardware, VMs, edge nodes, or Kubernetes without any Akka infrastructure or platform dependencies. Nodes have Akka clustering built
• Self-hosted Akka Platform regions - Enterprises can now run their own Akka Platform region without any dependency on Akka.io control planes. Services built with the Akka SDK have always been deployable onto Akka Platform, with Akka providing managed services through the company’s Akka Serverless and Akka BYOC offerings. Akka Platform provides fully automated operations, alleviating admins from more than 30 maintenance, security, and observability duties. Serverless and BYOC can federate multiple regions together by using an Akka control plane hosted at Akka.io.
  
  In contrast, the newly released option for self-hosted regions are Akka Platform regions with no Akka control plane dependency. Self-hosted regions can be installed, maintained, and managed by the customer in any data center with orchestration, proxy, and infrastructure dependencies specified by Akka. Since Akka Platform is updated many times each week, the installation of self-hosted regions is executed in cooperation with the Akka SRE team to ensure stability and consistency of a customer environment.

These two new options provide unique benefits to anyone building distributed systems at scale, as other frameworks strictly limit the infrastructure where an application can be deployed. An excellent example of this scenario is the industry’s shift toward Agentic AI. 

The agentic shift requires a fundamental architectural change from transaction-centered to conversation-centered systems. Traditional SaaS applications are built on stateless business logic executing CRUD operations against relational databases. In contrast, agentic services maintain state within the service itself and store each event to track how the service reached its current state.

As a result, developer teams experience very unpredictable behavior, limited planning and memory impacting agent effectiveness, hard failures at scale, opaque decision-making with zero transparency, and, perhaps most importantly, significant cost and latency concerns. 

Akka uniquely solves these issues for enterprises and aims to accelerate agentic AI application delivery as these technologies move from data science departments into core application delivery teams. Akka views this as a stack evolution, as agentic services augment rather than replace existing cloud-native application architecture. Akka’s implementation includes non-blocking asynchronous LLM adapters, automatic in-memory, and durable context databases, an event-driven system benchmarked to 10 million TPS, developer-friendly workflow tools, and multi-region deployment capabilities with replication filtering for compliance requirements. 

Already in production in global deployments with millions of users, Akka provides customers with the development and deployment options they need to deliver agentic AI for their businesses. Interested parties can find out more by visiting akka.io.

About Akka

Akka, formerly known as Lightbend, is relied upon by industry titans and disruptors to build and run distributed applications that are elastic, agile, and guaranteed resilient. For more information, visit www.akka.io.

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