You can’t develop a device any more without it connecting to something. These ‘smart’ devices all have one thing in common: they generate a never-ending stream of data. If you want to process all that data for 100, 1000 or 10000 devices, you can probably get by with a very simple web stack. But as soon as you want to scale to 1000000 or more devices, you’re going to need a better strategy.

Scaling software is always tricky. We all have been through this. You load balance your web farm only to find out that your database is a bottleneck. Or to find out you need to synchronize caches across your farm, etc. Akka.NET and its implementation of the actor model make scaling a bit easier. Developing stateful code becomes a breeze, as well as scaling it and making it resilient. But there are pitfalls as well.

No prior Akka.NET knowledge is required.