Exploring Stateful Microservices built with Akka Actors

How does one choose to architect a system that has a Microservice / REST api endpoints? There are many solutions out there. Some are better than others. Should state be held in a server side component? Generally we are told this is a bad practice, but is it? It’s unclear and this confusion may lead to poor technology stack choices that are impossible or extremely hard to change later on as your system evloves in terms of demand and performance.

We learn from the experience of others. Choosing whom to follow is hard and that’s exactly why we chose to present this, so that you the developer or technical decision maker can achieve your companies demands in the modern world. You may have heard that reactive backend systems could be one possible answer? But even so in this realm, the right combination and best practices are not well defined and there are good and not so good ways to craft your architecture.

We will provide the audience with a tried and true stack choice that exercises and promises to fulfill the expectations of a modern server solution that epitomizes all the elements needed to build, run and deploy a production reactive system today.

We will explore the fundamentals of such a system:

* Concurrency – how to take advantage of multi-core CPUs and clustered distributed systems by using Akka and the Actor model.

* REST API – I know Java, we use the JVM. What are my options?

* Deployment – I know how to spin up processes in Linux, but is that a good idea? Probably not, and how about containerization and orchestration using Kubernetes?

* Hardware – Linux dominates the cloud. We observe, that Enterprise Linux is what most of the industry uses. We propose Red Hat Linux or CentOS.