What is this?
Akka is a platform for building highly responsive, resilient and scalable distributed services; this repo holds its core libraries. It is used for transactional, analytical, agentic-AI, digital-twin, IoT and edge-to-cloud systems.
Akka is a platform for building highly responsive, resilient and scalable distributed services; this repo holds its core libraries. It is used for transactional, analytical, agentic-AI, digital-twin, IoT and edge-to-cloud systems.Is this repo the whole Akka platform, or just one part of it?This repo contains the foundational Akka core libraries. The wider platform adds the Akka SDK (rapid development with AI assist and automatic clustering) and Akka Automated Operations, a managed solution built on these same libraries.
This repo contains the foundational Akka core libraries. The wider platform adds the Akka SDK (rapid development with AI assist and automatic clustering) and Akka Automated Operations, a managed solution built on these same libraries.How do I add it to my project?Add the Akka core libraries as dependencies in your Scala or Java build; current versions are listed on the Akka Dependencies page, and reference documentation lives at doc.akka.io/libraries/.
Add the Akka core libraries as dependencies in your Scala or Java build; current versions are listed on the Akka Dependencies page, and reference documentation lives at doc.akka.io/libraries/.Do I have to write Scala, or does Java work too?Both work: the reference documentation covers the Akka core libraries for Scala and Java, and the codebase itself is written in Scala.
Both work: the reference documentation covers the Akka core libraries for Scala and Java, and the codebase itself is written in Scala.Do I need distributed-systems experience to use it?No — Akka is designed to be simple to learn and operate, building production-ready systems without requiring prior knowledge of events, threading, or distributed systems.
No — Akka is designed to be simple to learn and operate, building production-ready systems without requiring prior knowledge of events, threading, or distributed systems.Do my services have to run on Akka's own cloud?No — services built with it are automatically clustered and can be deployed on any infrastructure, and the managed Akka Automated Operations option runs safely inside your own VPC.
No — services built with it are automatically clustered and can be deployed on any infrastructure, and the managed Akka Automated Operations option runs safely inside your own VPC.Is Akka open source?No — it is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, a source-available license rather than a conventional open-source one; its tests and documentation fall under separate licenses.
No — it is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, a source-available license rather than a conventional open-source one; its tests and documentation fall under separate licenses.What do actors give me over plain threads and locks?Multi-threaded behavior without atomics or locks, transparent remote communication between components, and a clustered high-availability architecture that elastically scales in or out on demand — without writing and maintaining networking code yourself.
Multi-threaded behavior without atomics or locks, transparent remote communication between components, and a clustered high-availability architecture that elastically scales in or out on demand — without writing and maintaining networking code yourself.What is the 'Let it crash' idea about?For resilience Akka adopts the model the telecom industry has used with great success: instead of piling up defensive error handling, failing components are allowed to crash and be restarted, so applications self-heal and systems never stop.
For resilience Akka adopts the model the telecom industry has used with great success: instead of piling up defensive error handling, failing components are allowed to crash and be restarted, so applications self-heal and systems never stop.How proven is Akka at scale?It has been downloaded more than 1 billion times and has powered thousands of systems for over 15 years. It targets millions of concurrent users, terabyte stream processing, low-latency read/write data access, 99.9999% availability, and multi-region HA/DR.
It has been downloaded more than 1 billion times and has powered thousands of systems for over 15 years. It targets millions of concurrent users, terabyte stream processing, low-latency read/write data access, 99.9999% availability, and multi-region HA/DR.Which topics is it in?actor-model, concurrent-programming, resiliency, distributed-computing, fault-tolerance, scala, reactive, event-driven, scalability, concurrency, cloud-native, high-performance
actor-model, concurrent-programming, resiliency, distributed-computing, fault-tolerance, scala, reactive, event-driven, scalability, concurrency, cloud-native, high-performance