Microservices promised development teams a brand new world when it comes to developing, deploying, and distributing software. We could code services in any language, deploy them independently, enjoy partial failure instead of total, and straight-forwardly partition our teams along the same boundaries as some of our services.

But with these benefits came more expense and unanticipated costs. We now need multiple layers of routing and load-balancing. API gateways. Service discovery. Message brokers. Kafka. Laser manifolds. gRPC++ MQTT quantum tunneling. And so on.

In this talk we present a more refined, standardized, and simplified approach to building highly available, responsive, and distributed systems: distributed actors via Akka.NET. With this approach, we can eliminate most of the third party infrastructure needed to build effective applications, improve response times, and decrease human costs associated with building highly available software.