Dear hakkers,

One and a half years ago the Akka Team announced a place for the community to collect endpoints for systems integration with Akka Streams: Alpakka. The community showed its strength and we’ve received a lot of great contributions to this effort to enable enterprise integration in a reactive way.

During this time the Akka Team has enjoyed this great interest to contribute to Alpakka, but did not get to review Pull Requests as often as they would have liked. Core Akka and exploration of useful additions to it has been their main focus.

Therefore, we are very happy to announce that the company behind Akka, Lightbend, has set up a separate team to keep after Alpakka and give the community around it the attention it deserves.

The Alpakka team is now responsible for the Alpakka repository and the Akka Streams Kafka repository, which is considered part of the Alpakka project.

What does this mean for the community?

The collection of Akka Streams connectors that Alpakka is, will continue to be an Open Source project relying on the community. Feedback on issues and pull requests will be given much faster by the Alpakka team, so that the turn-around to implement features and to resolve issues will vastly improve.

In other words, by having a full time team responsible for those connectors, you can expect improved responsiveness, quality and commercial support for the Alpakka family of streaming connectors and patterns.

What does this mean for Lightbend subscription customers?

Lightbend’s intention is to become able to offer support for some parts of Alpakka. That is why the Alpakka team will work to improve the existing connectors and test them more thoroughly. Lightbend subscription customers will continue to get support for the Akka Streams Kafka library.

We hope you’re looking forward to Alpakka becoming an even more lively project, where the community engages to connect all the things.

Happy hakking!

– The Akka and Alpakka Teams