A Klubraum success story

Klubraum leverages Akka to build a distributed B2C app for organizing events that serves hundreds of thousands of users

Executive summary

The award-winning Klubraum app, developed by parent company aucentiq solutions, enables more than 10,000+ sporting clubs, hobby groups, social circles, and other consumer-based organizations to organize events, communicate, and plan outings. Akka enabled their small development team to build a global-scale app handling large, complex sets of interrelated data flows.

 

Akka @ aucentiq solutions
Elasticity Agility Resilience
More than 200K users across 10K+ groups, adding thousands of new users per month. Delivery of 10-12 interrelated microservices per user. 99.9999% availability for real-time responsiveness.

Akka allows us to ‘punch above its weight’ since performance and reliability are already built into the platform.

Steffen Haak
Founder & CEO. Klubraum

The challenge

With a small development team, build a world-class event-organizing app that can securely manage complex sets of diverse data in real-time, including a combination of calendars, chat, surveys, and myriad other features. This app also needed to scale reliably and easily.

The solution

The developer team first considered Java and Springboot as the platform for building Klubraum. They chose Akka because it delivers the scalability to service millions of users while abstracting much of the complexity in building the backend functionality.

The team leverages a Cassandra database and a Kubernetes cloud cluster, delivering a complex set of 10-12 microservices per user, including timelines, calendars, events, chat features, surveys, and event streaming. Akka made it easy for this set of interrelated functions to complement each other and deliver a reliable and responsive experience for Klubraum users.

With Akka, the Klubraum app attained:

  • Concurrency and parallelism: Management of multiple threads is simplified, ensuring safe concurrency without locks or complex synchronization mechanisms. For example, if the app has limited slots for a sporting event, it needs to ensure that two concurrent users don’t overwrite one another and receive the same slot.
  • Resiliency: Automatic recovery from failures, enabling Klubraum to save on operational costs.
  • Ease of development: Abstraction of backend system complexity to focus on business logic.
  • Scalability: Horizontal scalability across clusters and automatic scale up or down based on load.

The results

With Akka, the Klubraum team achieved enterprise-class results with a small startup team. Despite having no outside funding, Klubraum has built a consumer-focused social app that services hundreds of thousands of users daily and is growing rapidly.

After adopting Akka, the team achieved multiple key results, including:

  • Higher concurrency: Systems handle more requests with simpler, cleaner code.
  • Resilience: Automatic recovery from failures keeps systems running smoothly.
  • Better scalability: Easily scale across multiple nodes and handle increasing traffic.
  • Faster development: Unified handling of concurrency, fault tolerance, and distribution speeds up development and reduces maintenance.
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