// AKKA.NET
Articles on Akka.NET architecture, actor model patterns, clustering, persistence, and distributed systems design from the framework's creators.
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There are many different strategies for retrying the “failed” delivery of messages over the network: exponential backoff, retry loops, circuit breakers, etc. What these have in common is that they are “sender-side” retry strategies - it is the message sender’s...
One of the complaints we’ve heard for years from Akka.NET developers is “it’s hard to debug Akka.NET clusters locally.” For a long time there were manual work-arounds and techniques such as using multiple launchSettings.json profiles and launching a seed node...
Imagine your business has to execute long-running jobs that can take anywhere from a few minutes to tens of hours to execute. You want to scale horizontally on-demand in order to parallelize job execution - Akka.NET is a perfect technology...
I’ve been wanting to write this post every single day for about six weeks now, and I finally get to: we shipped a brand new open source project called Netclaw. Netclaw is an always-on, autonomous personal assistant built on top...
Register one OpenTelemetry source and your traces will show the real shape of your Akka.Streams graph: every stage, in the order it actually runs. No commercial license, no extra wiring. It’s built into Akka.NET as of v1.5.66. People have been...
Back at the very end of March we shipped Akka.NET v1.5.64. We’ve done a handful of releases since then, but I want to come back to this one specifically, because it contained a change that’s been a long time coming:...
Every so often a customer comes along whose use case is so demanding that it validates every design decision you’ve ever made in the framework. Luware is that customer for us. Jason Shave is an Engineering Manager at Luware, where...
Here’s a scenario we hit all the time on TextForge: a new user signs up, connects their Gmail account, and now we have to pull down their entire mailbox history. For the pro plan, that can be hundreds of thousands...
We’re about a year into the process of completely re-working Sdkbin to better support our needs here at Petabridge and, eventually, other third-party software vendors. Sdkbin was originally built on an extremely flimsy CRUD architecture that violates most of my...
In October 2025, we disclosed the most critical security vulnerability ever found in Akka.NET: CVE-2025-61778. This vulnerability affects Akka.Remote’s TLS implementation - specifically, we were supposed to implement mutual TLS (mTLS), but we didn’t. The server never validated client certificates,...
When your Akka.NET application starts dropping 70-80% of incoming connections in production, who do you call? That’s the situation one of our Production Support customers faced this year - and it’s exactly the kind of problem our Akka.NET Support Plans...
Running Akka.NET in Kubernetes can feel like a daunting task if you’re doing it for the first time. Between StatefulSets, Deployments, RBAC permissions, health checks, and graceful shutdowns, there are a lot of moving parts to get right. But here’s...
We have just recently shipped Akka.Hosting v1.5.48.1 and newer, all of which now have built-in Microsoft.Extensions.HealthCheck integration that is significantly easier to configure, fewer packages to install, and easier to customize than what we had with Akka.HealthChecks. This post consists...
Phobos 2.10 is here, and it’s a game-changer for anyone running Akka.NET applications in production. This release doesn’t just incrementally improve observability - it fundamentally transforms how you understand and troubleshoot actor performance in your clusters. The headline features: accurate...
If you’re using Kafka in .NET, you’re probably writing hundreds of lines of code just to handle “what happens when my consumer crashes?” or “how do I retry failed messages?” or “what happens when I’m consuming messages too fast?” What...
We just recently wrote about using Akka.Management to help automate Akka.Cluster formation in most runtime environments - this post deals with a similar theme: how Akka.Cluster’s built-in infrastructure deals with network failures that will inevitably occur inside any distributed application...
Akka.Cluster is a very powerful piece of software aimed at helping .NET developers build highly available, low-latency, distributed software. At its core, Akka.Cluster is about building peer-to-peer networks—that’s what a “cluster” actually is: a peer-to-peer network that runs in a...
It was just about 10 years ago when we shipped Akka.NET v1.0.2, the release where we first introduced betas of some of our most popular Akka.Persistence plugins: Akka.Persistence.Postgres, Akka.Persistence.SqlServer, and Akka.Persistence.Sqlite. All of these plugins were based off of a...
Over the past several months the Akka.NET team has had reports of the following Exception popping up unexpectedly throughout many of our plugins and end-user applications that use the Akka.Streams1 SelectAsync stage - such as Akka.Streams.Kafka and Akka.Persistence.Sql: That error...
Akka.NET Bootcamp has a special place in my heart because it’s really “the thing” that launched Petabridge as a business 10 years ago. However, the original Akka.NET Bootcamp should have really been replaced years ago as both Akka.NET and the...
We’re kicking off 2025 with a fresh look at Akka.NET and what we have planned for our next big release: Akka.NET v1.6! Akka.NET v1.6: a Performance-Focused Release As it says in our promo image here - Akka.NET v1.6 is a...
One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we get from developers who are new to Akka.NET is that the “learning curve” is high. I want to explore that today and why I think this isn’t actually true, but what...
A really, really common question Akka.NET beginners have within the first couple of hours of looking at Akka.NET: “how is the IActorRef.Tell method asynchronous if it’s a void method? Shouldn’t it return a Task I can await on?” Today I’m...
We put together a new YouTube video on our Petabridge channel (which you should subscribe to) yesterday, “Akka.NET Actors’ Hidden Super Power: Switchable Behaviors” - all about one of my favorite features in Akka.NET: the Become method for swapping actor...
The month of July, 2024 was pretty rough for me and the Petabridge crew from a workload standpoint. Our office got hit with a hurricane. My entire family and I were out sick with COVID in the middle of being...
It’s been a little while since we covered Akka.NET 101 on our blog, so we decided it was time to visit one of the most fundamental and significant matters users need to understand about Akka.NET in order to leverage it...
We first introduced Akka.Hosting a couple of years ago and released it to market one of the major pillars of Akka.NET v1.5. Without any exaggeration, it is the single best usability improvement we have ever made to Akka.NET and we...
Akka.Cluster.Sharding distributes .NET entity actors across an Akka.NET cluster and rebalances their shards safely as nodes join or leave. You send a message to an entity ID; Sharding routes it to the one active entity actor, wherever that actor currently...
It’s been a very long time since we’ve refreshed our Akka.NET training courses or Akka.NET support plans - so I’m pleased to announce that we are doing both effective immediately. You can watch my video summary below or read on:...
When troubleshooting performance problems in distributed systems or locally-run, high-throughput-required software I tell our users “your most severe performance problems are almost always going to be caused by flow control issues.” My preferred batting order for troubleshooting performance issues is:...
It seems like just yesterday that I wrote “Akka.NET - One Year Later”; as of November 21st, 2023, Akka.NET is now ten years old. I don’t have my original prototype Akka code anymore; all I have is Helios - the...
Last Thursday, September 7th we executed our “Akka.NET Application Management Best Practices” webinar and I’ve made the recording available on YouTube for everyone to watch for themselves. The code sample I created for this webinar can also be found here:...
In our previous post we covered the Akka.NET v1.5 release and in particular, we focused on the changes made to the core Akka.NET modules. In this blog post we’re going to cover the three new libraries we’ve added to Akka.NET...
As of today, Akka.NET v1.5 is now available as a stable release package on NuGet for both .NET Standard 2.0 and NET 6.0. This is a big release aimed at addressing pain points for current Akka.NET users. We’ve published a...
One of our major engineering milestones for Akka.NET v1.5 (ships on February 28th, 2023): Make CQRS a priority in Akka.Persistence This blog post is about an interesting engineering challenge we had to solve to accomplish this for Akka.NET v1.5: supporting...
Author’s Note: Petabridge turned 8 years old this month and over the years I’ve only written a couple of articles about our internal processes for developing software and running an open source software business. In late 2021 we began using...
.NET 7.0 was released to market last week and includes hundreds of major improvements across the board. I ran Akka.NET’s RemotePingPong benchmark on .NET 7.0 shortly after installing the .NET 7.0 SDK - I’ll take every free lunch I can...
N.B. For the purpose of clarity: “Akka” refers to Lightbend’s Scala / Java library and “Akka.NET” refers to the .NET Foundation library maintained by Petabridge. I have been very careful in my writing to ensure there is a little confusion...
As of today, Phobos 2.0 - our fully OpenTelemetry-enabled instrumentation library for Akka.NET, is now available for production use with Akka.NET. The key features of Phobos 2.0 are as follows: Requires no instrumentation code on the part of the end-user;...
In our Akka.NET Community Standup on March 9th, 2022 we presented for the very first time Akka.Hosting - a new approach to configuring Akka.NET and managing ActorSystems that requires zero HOCON, automatically enforces Akka.NET best practices, is type-checked, and makes...
We’ve prepared a set of three professional-grade dotnet new templates (Petabridge.Templates) for use with your projects - these will help you get started right away with Akka.NET or developing your own NuGet libraries that you wish to distribute. We’ve built...
Many years ago I wrote an article entitled “How to Do Asynchronous I/O with Akka.NET Actors Using PipeTo” - back when await support was still very much a work in progress. I subsequently wrote a major update on that article...
Since announcing Phobos 1.0 a year ago we’ve made many significant changes to it that should add many useful new ways to observe the run-time behavior of your Akka.NET applications in production. Phobos is a commercial add-on for Akka.NET that...
A concept I’ve been trying to put a name to is software application architectures that inherently lend themselves to a lower rate of technical debt accumulation than others. This post is my first attempt to do that. Technical Debt Technical...
On this blog before we’ve covered a high level introduction to Akka.Streams for Akka.NET, but in this post we go into some more detail on: What is Akka.Streams; The motivations for using Akka.Streams; and When should you use Akka.Streams? “Introduction...
In the recent past we blogged about hosting headless Akka.NET services using IHostedService and we thought we’d extend that train of thought to cover ASP.NET Core. .NET’s web ecosystem has changed a lot since 2015, when we last wrote about...
Vertech is an industrial automation and information solutions company based out of the United States that develops solutions for a broad range of industries. This case study was authored by John Wolnisty, a Solutions Architect at Vertech who, in the...
At Akka.NET’s inception, most of the server-side code samples we produced all demonstrated how to build so-called “headless” Akka.NET services as outright Windows Services primarily using libraries like Topshelf. .NET has changed tremendously since then and become a truly cross-platform...
As part of the Akka.NET v1.4.15 release we’ve completely rewritten how dependency injection works in Akka.NET and introduced a new library: Akka.DependencyInjection. In this blog post we’re going to introduce Akka.DependencyInjection and some of the best practices for working with...
In our previous installment of “Real World Akka.NET Clustering”, we covered state machines - the tried and true tool for modeling event-driven behavior for business entities inside your domain. And we also demonstrated that using Akka.NET programming techniques such as...
Phobos is Petabridge’s application performance monitoring (APM) integration library for Akka.NET, which we released originally back in 2018. Since then it’s undergone some major changes and transformations in order to better support Akka.NET and Akka.NET users. Short Version Phobos, our...
Petabridge recently launched its first cloud service, Sdkbin, and it’s been a great opportunity for our team to use the Akka.NET tools, patterns, and practices that we’ve been recommending to our customers for years. In this blog post I’m going...
As of this week, Akka.NET v1.4 is now fully available for users to use. We’ve published a detailed article on the Akka.NET website that describes what’s new in Akka.NET v1.4, but we wanted to capture some of the highlights here....
The goal of this blog post is to give you a glimpse of the idea and basics behind Akka.Streams. What they are and why you may find them useful addition in your day to day job. In short: Akka.Streams is...
In this blog post we’re going to cover some best practices you can use when designing domain events and objects intended to work with Akka.NET. If you follow these best practices you’ll run into fewer errors, clearer log messages, and...
We introduced Petabridge.Cmd in 2017 to make it easy for Akka.NET users to deploy, monitor, and manage their Akka.NET applications. We have now expanded the capabilities of Petabridge.Cmd by introducing two new command palettes to further simplify the way you...
A while back I created a thread on Twitter to attempt to explain the difference between Akka.NET and some other popular message-distribution and queuing technologies, such as Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ. Common question I get from users who are just...
We released Phobos, our enterprise DevOps suite for Akka.NET only just last month and we’ve already had major Akka.NET users put it through its paces in development and production environments. Based on our users’ feedback and suggestions, we’ve developed Phobos...
One of the most powerful features of Akka.NET actors is their built-in fault tolerance. Actors are an extremely effective tool at isolating failures and preventing them from having side effects on other parts of your application. However, one of the...
Today it’s my pleasure to announce the production-ready release of Phobos, an enterprise DevOps suite for Akka.NET developers. The initial release of Phobos is primarily aimed at solving the following problems: Instrumenting and monitoring activity from actors inside large Akka.NET...
Akka.Cluster is one of the most popular and useful parts of the Akka.NET ecosystem as a whole, but it’s also one of the most concept-heavy areas. We have a lot of literature on both the official Akka.NET documentation and elsewhere...
Since the recent Akka.NET v1.3.0 release we’ve been working furiously to upgrade all of our plugins and other tools that are heavily used by the Akka.NET community in order to ensure that you can get everything you need to go...
In addition to Akka.NET joining the .NET Foundation and announcing our participation in the .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest, we had two more major Akka.NET developments to announce on Friday: Akka.NET v1.3, which adds .NET Standard support to Akka.NET, is released...
It’s our pleasure to announce that as of today, Akka.NET is officially part of the .NET Foundation! Akka.NET is joining an elite group of projects such as Roslyn, NuGet, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and others. What Does This Mean for...
Petabridge has been working with Akka.NET users since January, 2015 and one of the biggest gaps in the Akka.NET ecosystem thus far has been adequate tooling for deployment, monitoring, and management of Akka.NET applications. This has been especially true for...
Fresh off the release of Akka.NET 1.2 last month, we’ve been hard at work moving onto the next set of changes and developments for Akka.NET. So let’s get right into it. Current State of Akka.NET First, our previous Akka.NET roadmap...
A ton of work has gone into Akka.NET thus far in 2017, and the biggest release we’ve done since last year’s Akka.NET 1.1 release just hit NuGet: Akka.NET v1.2. Akka.NET v1.2 is the culmination of months of work on many...
Today we’ll talk about one of the most common communication patterns, which is publish/subscribe, and how to perform it in a distributed environments using Akka.NET. In case if you want to save yourself some time implementing it, its already available...
We have an updated guide to Akka.Cluster.Sharding that incorporates newer APIs and practices. Please see “Distributing State Reliably with Akka.Cluster.Sharding” instead. In our previous post about using Akka.Cluster.Sharding we looked at the module from an end-user’s perspective. Today we’ll provide...
We have an updated guide to Akka.Cluster.Sharding that incorporates newer APIs and practices. Please see “Distributing State Reliably with Akka.Cluster.Sharding” instead. In this post, we’ll discuss one of the Akka.NET plugins, Akka.Cluster.Sharding and how it gives us easier, higher level...
In the first post in this series, we discussed how the correct place to begin thinking about an Akka.NET application is actually with your data flows and organizing those into reusable “protocols”. Once that’s done, then it’s time to start...
On Monday, September 26th at 8:00am PDT Petabridge will be hosting a free webinar entitled “Introduction to Distributed Systems with Akka.NET with Akka.Cluster“ - the goal of which is to help educate developers, architects, and technology executives on how these...
Our last customer case study “Akka.NET Goes to Wall Street” remains as one of the most popular articles on Petabridge, and today I’m pleased to share with you a new case study written by Kim-Lisa Gad and the DigiOutsource team...
Since releasing Akka.NET 1.1 I’ve been spending more time sharpening the saw here at Petabridge. Combing over the ways we spend our time and money and quantifying the returns that provides to us and to our customers. As it turns...
More and more companies are choosing to use Akka.NET each day to fulfill mission-critical workloads in tons of different business domains: finance, health care, fleet and vehicle tracking, energy, and more. Beginning today Petabridge is pleased to offer these companies...
[!IMPORTANT] This blog post is out of date and the practices here are no longer recommended for state distribution with Akka.NET. Please see “Distributing State Reliably with Akka.Cluster.Sharding” instead. One of the most frequently asked questions about Akka.Cluster I receive...
As of a few moments ago, we released Akka.NET 1.1 - the biggest feature release we’ve done for Akka.NET since releasing 1.0 last year! We have other major Akka.NET feature releases planned for later this year, but this is the...
It’s been a while since we’ve published an official roadmap update for Akka.NET. We are still on track to achieve the goals of the previous roadmap, but with a few minor changes that I will explain here. Akka.NET 1.1 -...
Akka.NET is a .NET implementation of the actor model. The actor model is an old technology, originating in 1973 as an approach to parallel computing at a time when it looked like the computers of the future might be constructed...
This is a follow-up to our last post, “How to Guarantee Delivery of Messages in Akka.NET.” In that post we introduced the AtLeastOnceDeliveryActor and talked about strategies for retrying deliveries of messages in order to make sure they’re successfully procssed....
A question we get asked about frequently with Akka.NET is “how can I guarantee that my messages will eventually be received and processed by another actor?” Most of the time it’s developers who work on finance applications who have this...
After last month’s successful Akka.NET virtual meetup, we’re going to be coming right back with another on on February 29th at 18:00 UTC. RSVP Here. Update: thanks to everyone who attended! You can view the meetup below! When is the...
2016 is going to be a big year for Akka.NET, and we’re starting things off right by hosting our second Akka.NET Virtual Meetup on Tuesday, January 26th @ 18:00UTC. RSVP Here. Update: thanks to everyone who attended! You can view...
One of the most frequently asked questions I get is about how to create stateful actors that are also durable by default, meaning that the actor can recover its state from some sort of storage engine in the event that...
In this post we introduce the Akka.TestKit module - a library that makes it easy to unit test Akka.NET actors using all of the popular .NET unit testing frameworks. A Brief End-to-End Akka.TestKit Example Before going deep into the TestKit,...
The concepts in this post were first introduced in a talk at the 2015 Cassandra Summit. I’ve been a .NET developer for roughly 10 years now - since the summer after my freshman year in college in 2005 I’ve been...
Stopping an actor is a routine operation that developers often find confusing. This is because each actor is like a micro process, and all interaction with an actor is asynchronous. So shutting down an actor is more complex than stopping...
The actor model is a radically new concept for the majority of Akka.NET users, and therein lies some challenges. In this post we’re going to outline some of the common mistakes we see from beginners all the time when we...
NOTE: A lot has changed in both the .NET and Akka.NET ecosystems since this post was originally written in 2015 and we have since released an updated blog post: “Best Practices for Integrating Akka.NET with ASP.NET Core and SignalR”. Lots...
One of the questions that has been coming up a lot lately as many people are building with Akka.Remote is this: How big of a message can I send over the network? I’ve been asked about this four or five...
Just the other day, I saw this tweet and knew this post was long overdue: Is there any list of actor model design patterns ? @AkkaDotNET— Laurent Lepinay (@foobarcode) June 24, 2015 Quite understandably, people want to know what the...
This first Akka.NET cluster tutorial shows you how to turn a local actor application into a scalable cluster with Akka.Cluster. Start with a working Akka.NET application and basic actor-model familiarity; the lesson walks through cluster formation, includes a 21-minute video...
Today we shipped Akka.NET v1.0.2, a maintenance release that fixed a number of bugs as well as introduced some exciting new features. Major Akka.Cluster Stability Upgrades Akka.Cluster is still in beta at the moment, but we’re on target for a...
One of the absolute coolest things you can do in Akka.NET is remotely deploy actors over the internet to other machines. You can literally deploy code somewhere other than the immediate, local process making the call. Note: The code samples...
My favorite part about teaching Akka.NET to people is the questions I get. I never have any clue what someone is going to ask me, and that’s kind of exciting. Last Thursday, we had an awesome group of developers participate...
The release of Akka.NET 1.0 marked the delivery of the project’s first major milestone and enabled us to commit to preserving long-term APIs for the foreseeable future. The core Akka.NET team and I have put together a rough roadmap that...
Today, we’re going to begin introducing the world to the internals of Akka.NET. These are the advanced technical topics and explain what is actually going on “under the hood” to make the magic happen. We begin our exploration with Akka.Remote....
Open-source frameworks these days, they just grow up so darn fast… Today marks a major milestone on a long road—466 days since the first commit, to be exact—in bringing the Reactive Model to the CLR. Akka.NET has officially left -beta...
Today the Akka.NET project hit a massive milestone and became code complete for version 1.0. This puts us on track to hit the v1.0 public release within the timeframe that we (the core Akka.NET contributors) committed to back in February....
Today we’re going to learn about one of the really cool things actors can do: change their behavior at run-time! This capability allows you to do all sorts of cool stuff, like build Finite State Machines (FSM) or change how...
Now that Akka.NET is leaving beta and hitting the 1.0 milestone, we’ve seen interest and production usage ramp up quickly. The Last Few Months Over the last two months, we’ve been working with several cutting-edge teams to help them rearchitect...
Over the last several months, interest in Akka.NET has increased dramatically. And yet, many people find the actor model intimidating and can’t seem to really get up and running. Developers want to learn how to use Akka.NET, but where do...
After over a year of hard work, we’re thrilled to announce that Akka.NET will soon be leaving beta! The community of global contributors has grown rapidly and is picking up even more momentum. Akka.NET (repo) is a community-driven port of...
NOTE: These are the official release notes from https://github.com/akkadotnet/akka.net/releases/tag/v0.8, but with some slight formatting changes. Dependency Injection Support For Ninject, Castle Windsor, and Autofac Thanks to some amazing effort from individual contributor (@jcwrequests), Akka.NET now has direct dependency injection support...
One of the first questions developers ask once they learn how Akka.NET actors work is If actors can only process one message at a time, can I still use async methods or Task<T> objects inside my actors? The answer is...
An Akka.NET actor is an isolated C# object that receives messages and processes one message at a time. Actors communicate by sending messages instead of sharing mutable state, which makes concurrent and distributed systems easier to reason about. If you...
It’s been a massive year for Akka.NET and I want to highlight some of the amazing contributions that have been made to that project. I’m writing this post from my perspective, but it’s not about me. This month marks the...