A Cone Center success story

Cone Center chooses Akka to build sophisticated logistics applications for major ports and distribution centers

Executive summary

Serving more than 350 customers across 24 countries, Cone Center builds multimodal transport logistics data applications for organizations focused on cargo transportation and logistics. With Akka, Cone Center is able to provide the demanding transportation and logistics markets with low latency and real-time processing for streamlined and safer operations.

 

Elasticity Agility Resilience
Large and variable data handling across IoT devices and ML pipelines with <5ms latency. Small team handling custom deployments from 350 customers across 24 countries. Built-in fault tolerance and automatic recovery to support 24x7 cargo terminal operations.

Akka is the ideal solution for a developer team like ours that needs to ‘punch above its weight’ and deliver world-class solutions with a smaller team than you may find at a large software app house. The platform handles so many complex issues automatically. In addition, recruiting new employees is easier with Akka, as it is such a well-known framework.

Ilya Kachalsky
Software Engineer and Team Leader. Cone Center

The challenge

Build a resilient and low-latency innovative solution for managing modern transportation and logistics environments that streamline operations and ensure safety.

Building in Python was initially considered, however, it was quickly realized the solution required significant concurrency, which meant multi-threading, a feature that Python does not have.

The solution

When evaluating the scalability and resilience needed for their application, the Cone Center team turned to Scala and then Akka. They found that Akka provides the functionality required and has a community to support their development needs.

Its (C)One Terminal application manages myriad concurrent tasks and data sets, including documents, vehicles, cargo, and more. Akka’s model simplifies managing multiple threads, ensuring safe concurrency without locks or complex synchronization mechanisms.

Similarly, the (C)One GOS application used Akka for multiple functions, including managing stateless services and assigning devices, distributing tasks across the system, managing how images are processed through ML pipelines, monitoring the state of connected equipment, providing notifications in case of issues, and offering various ML-related metrics to streamline future training processes.

Akka gave Cone Center’s developer team:

  • Agility: A relatively small development team maintains hundreds of deployments in dozens of countries.
  • Resilient systems: Data can be saved intact and independent of failures in other parts of the application, guaranteeing the high integrity of available data.
  • Low latency: Ultra-low latency responses, including equipment requiring hands-on control such as barriers, multiple cameras, laser detection (lidar), and lights with <5ms latency.

The results

Leveraging Akka, Cone Center was able to build and deploy its (C)One Terminal application in a diverse set of environments supporting all modes of transport.

After adopting Akka, the team achieved:

  • Higher concurrency: Systems handle more requests with simpler, cleaner code.
  • Improved resilience: Automatic recovery from failures keeps systems running smoothly.
  • Better scalability: Easily scale across multiple nodes and handle increasing traffic.
  • Faster solution delivery: Flexibility enables (C)One Terminal to adapt to any environment, a critical element as each terminal has unique needs.
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