Celebrating a milestone: Akka surpasses 1 billion downloads

Introduction

We are excited to share a significant achievement for Akka and are delighted to announce that Akka has recently surpassed an incredible milestone of over 1 billion downloads (1,073,764,049 to be more accurate, but who's counting). This remarkable accomplishment stands as a testament to the dedication and commitment of the Akka team, the exceptional capabilities of Akka and the continuous support from the developer community.

The early days and evolution

Akka was first introduced in the summer of 2009 with a vision to empower developers in building highly concurrent and distributed applications on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). From its humble beginnings, Akka quickly gained recognition for its unique design philosophy based on the Actor model (created by Carl Hewitt in 1973), offering a scalable and resilient approach to application development.

Progress and adoption

As developers discovered the transformative power of Akka, its adoption surged across the industry. Our early adopters like Amazon, Autodesk, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and Blizzard Entertainment recognized Akka's ability to handle high levels of concurrency, fault tolerance and distributed computing scenarios, making it a preferred choice for building robust and scalable applications.

Over the years, Akka's influence continued to expand rapidly. In 2022 alone, Akka witnessed an impressive 274,762,549 downloads, a testament to the confidence and trust developers have placed in the framework's capabilities. This overwhelming response reflects the ever-growing demand for scalable and resilient solutions in the fast-paced digital landscape.

Akka is used for a multitude of use cases across many industries, with customers including the likes of Disney Streaming, GM, HPE, ING, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Starbucks and Tesla.

Key factors for success

Several factors have contributed to Akka's remarkable success:

Scalability and resilience: Akka's foundation on the Actor model has empowered developers to build systems that effortlessly scale and recover from failures. Its fault-tolerance features ensure the availability and responsiveness of applications, even in challenging circumstances.

Supportive community and collaboration: Akka's success is indebted to the passionate and collaborative community that surrounds it. The open-source nature of the framework has fostered an ecosystem of libraries, tools and extensions, amplifying its capabilities and extending its reach. The collective efforts of developers worldwide have been instrumental in driving Akka's growth.

Industry-wide adoption: Akka has gained significant traction across various industries, spanning from startups to enterprises. Its versatility and ability to handle complex distributed systems have made it a preferred choice for building mission-critical applications, where reliability and scalability are paramount.

Constant innovation: Innovation lies at the core of Akka's success. We are committed to a culture of continuous improvement and evolution, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in distributed application development. In the last year we have added features around Performance, Usability and have made massive strides to an even more powerful future with Akka Distributed Cloud.

Looking ahead

As we celebrate this momentous milestone of 1 billion downloads, we reflect on the journey that has brought us here. Akka's impact on distributed application development has been profound, and we remain committed to pushing boundaries and driving innovation.

The future holds tremendous promise for Akka. As the demand for scalable and fault-tolerant systems continues to rise, we are dedicated to further empowering developers and shaping the landscape of distributed computing. Collaboration with the developer community will remain at the core of our efforts as we explore new horizons and evolve Akka to meet emerging challenges.

In addition to its existing strengths, we are excited to explore running Akka natively at the Edge, what we are calling Akka Edge. We want to leverage Akka's capabilities closer to the data source as this opens up new opportunities for building highly responsive and efficient distributed systems. We aim to seamlessly integrate with edge devices and leveraging Akka's scalability and fault tolerance, empowering developers to create applications that span the entire cloud to edge continuum.

Conclusion

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to our dedicated team, the thriving Akka community, and the countless developers who have embraced Akka throughout its evolution. Surpassing 1 billion downloads is a testament to your unwavering support and recognition of Akka's exceptional capabilities. We take pride in this milestone and look forward to a future where Akka continues to empower developers, enabling them to build resilient and scalable applications that shape the future of distributed computing.