Lightbend is now Akka

4 minute read

Today, we are announcing:

Akka 3 - Build and run responsive applications.
Unification - Our portfolio has been combined into a single product: Akka.
Akka.io - A completely new site for elastic, agile, and resilient apps.
Lightbend d/b/a Akka - Lightbend is now doing business as Akka!

Customer commitment

We will be retiring Kalix.io and Lightbend.com properties. All existing customer services and applications will continue to operate unabated.

We are introducing new ways to build and run Akka apps that are additive and have no impact on your existing applications.

The Akka libraries that you have used over the last 15 years are also included in the new Akka, will always be a part of Akka, and will indefinitely have new feature investments. The Akka libraries are foundational to our company, our business, and our products.

Akka is a marvel

Akka is one of the great technology successes of the last 15 years. With 1 billion downloads and 100,000 applications built, no other distributed systems framework is more proven than Akka. Akka is relied upon by industry titans and disruptors to build applications that are elastic, agile, and resilient.

Since joining in January, I learned the following about Akka:

Akka “just works."
Akka is complex.
Akka doesn’t operate apps.
Our users and employees love Akka.

How do we build on Akka’s achievements while overcoming Akka’s primary weakness—complexity? By obsessing on simplicity.

Now, Akka is simple

Today we are announcing Akka 3, the next generation of Akka.

Akka 3 includes the world’s most popular libraries for building distributed systems along with introducing a platform that makes it simple to create responsive applications.

Developers will need under a day to become productive in building and running stateful services that can scale to over 1M TPS while maintaining sub-20ms end user latencies. These services are multi-cloud, multi-region replicated so that you can run your application across multiple hyperscalers simultaneously or enact repatriation to avoid cloud lock-in.

Give it a try at https://akka.io

Now, Akka is day-2 ready

The industry has spent trillions on infrastructure that cannot guarantee an application’s SLA.

Per Gartner, “Infrastructure resilience alone is insufficient to deliver the zero-downtime services that end users expect.” – 9 Principles for Improving Cloud Resilience.

Until your application takes responsibility for its own SLA outcomes, you will have an uncertain future. It’s time for the industry to think app-down instead of infrastructure-up.

With Akka 3, apps are Responsive by Design – apps that ensure their SLA by adapting continuously, independent of their infrastructure bindings.

To deliver on these commitments, you can now build and run apps with Akka. We are introducing Serverless and BYOC environments that automate Day 2 operations for Akka apps.

Multi-region: Akka apps operate across hyperscalers, regions, and devices.
Migratable: Akka apps can migrate from one location to another such as Serverless to BYOC, AWS to GCP, or NA to EMEA.
Recoverable: Akka apps replay and restore state at any previous point in time.
Elastic: Akka apps auto-scale to varying workloads while placing multi-master replicas near users.
Agile: Akka updates, rebalances and repartitions workloads to enable no-downtime upgrades.
Resilient: Akka transparently persists app state to restore an app from any potential failure.

akka_responsive_by_design

Akka is proven

Akka 3 is proven, generating millions in revenue with industry titans that are not quite ready to be publicly identified:

A Global SaaS vendor with 2M users porting a non-scaling .NET app.
An international bank transforming 4-week manual processes into hours-long workflows.
An online retailer that required writable 1M+ IOPS with <20ms latency.

Akka is first

Jonas Bonér, our founder and CTO, originally created Akka 15 years ago to solve thorny problems with authoring apps to efficiently run on multi-core systems. Akka was the first framework to use actors to eliminate the problems that come with building multi-threaded systems.

There has been a steady drumbeat of innovations and firsts that Akka has produced since. That pace continues, and today we are announcing multiple industry firsts:

The first PaaS that enables application migration – applications replicate across clouds, regions, and devices for no-downtime migrations, repatriation, and disaster recovery.
The first application runtime with Multi-Master Replication – apps act as their own in-memory, durable database with writable CRDT replicas running globally so failover never makes users wait.
The first app resilience guarantee – Akka now indemnifies our customers against losses caused by an app becoming unreliable.