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:

Why Buy a Support Plan?

I cover this in our video and I’ll lead with it here: “why buy an Akka.NET support plan in the first place?”

Akka.NET is an extremely well-engineered, well-maintained project with lots of free support from the end-user community and Petabridge itself in the Akka.NET Discord, on GitHub, on StackOverflow, and elsewhere.

That being said, the business case for purchasing support is strong:

Production Support Cases

The use case for Production Support is to have help lined up before there’s an emergency, not during it. Our Production Support plans include a 1 business day SLA, video calls upon request, Slack Connect integration with our team, and the ability to get Akka.NET patched on short notice if necessary.

If you have an urgent production problem, our team can help you solve it same-day. However, if you wait until you have a problem before you contact us, you are putting your own procurement department on the critical path between your problem and your solutions. Don’t wait - get help lined up, ready to go, before you need it.

Design-Time Support Cases

With “Design-Time” Support, the goal is to get Akka.NET design, deployment, and debugging help before those issues can mushroom into production problems. Get architecture, design, use case, deployment, dev ops, and any other questions under consideration answered in a timely, complete fashion by the people who build Akka.NET.

Training

All Petabridge support plans include unlimited access to our full training catalog - so new members on your team who need to get up to speed on Akka.NET can be trained by the creators of the framework itself.

Speaking of our training…

New Training Courses

Our original “Complete Akka.NET Curriculum” training course series: Akka.NET Design Patterns, Akka.NET Remoting, and Akka.NET Clustering, launched in early 2015 and has helped hundreds of Akka.NET developers take their ideas to realization and even into production at large scales.

Those courses were very valuable when Akka.NET was an emerging technology, not the established, venerable technology that it is today. Much of the information in those courses is now available for free through places like this blog, the Petabridge YouTube channel, third party courses on PluralSight, and more. On top of that: the code samples and much of the material itself was showing its age and in dire need of a refresh.

Therefore, if you visit https://petabridge.com/training/ you’ll notice a spate of new training courses:

• Akka.NET End to End Application Design Training (half-day long course) - a continuation of many of the concepts we covered in “Akka.NET Application Management Best Practices.”
• Building Streaming Systems with Akka.NET Streams (2hrs long course) - you’ll learn about some of the basics of Akka.Streams here and also how to integrate it with other real-world streaming technologies like Kafka, Azure EventHubs, SignalR, and more. For long-time Akka.Streams fans: this also includes information on how to use StreamRefs to build stream graphs that span the network.
• Real-World Distributed Systems with Akka.Cluster (2hrs long course) - a less conceptual, more practical successor to our Akka.NET Clustering course with a heavy focus on issues like state distribution with Akka.Cluster.Sharding, reliable message delivery, using DistributedPubSub, and more architectural concerns like integrating with non-Akka.NET technologies.

All of our courses were half a day long previously - but we’re going to experiment with some shorter, more focused courses. We will continue to make changes to our course catalog more frequently in the future.

Pricing Changes for Training

All of our live webinar training courses are now available to Akka.NET Support plan customers only, going forward. If you want training, you will need to purchase a support plan.

Once you have a plan, you can request a seat at all of the available trainings. We still cap class sizes at 10 people per course in order to make sure that everyone’s questions get answered, so registration is available on a first come, first serve basis.

New Support Plan Offerings

Since 2018 or so, all of Petabridge’s Akka.NET Support plans have been sold as a package of “engineering hours” that you and your team can gradually burn down on issues you submit through our support portal at https://help.petabridge.com/. We also offered the option to convert 4 unused support hours into a training seat - so companies with unspent hours at the end of a billing cycle could use those hours to help train members of their team.

As of today, we’re changing our model for support:

• Unlimited seats for both support and training - get all of your people who intend to use Akka.NET into a class and onto our support portal;
• Unlimited support incidents - no more hours. You file incidents and we will just work them.
• Access to our support portal - so everything your team submits is confidential and only accessible via our support team (the same developers who maintain Akka.NET.)
• Access to our private #premium-support Discord channel - which will get a higher prioritization of service than the community-supported #akkadotnet-help room.

We offer two different tiers of support:

• Design-Time Support - for companies who need design-time (non-production) help, costs $3995 per year;
• Production Support - for companies who are in production with Akka.NET and want the highest service level agreement for their team, costs $9995 per year. If you need us to review logs / perform production incident troubleshooting, this is the plan you will want to purchase.

I won’t repost the entire Akka.NET support plan feature comparison chart on this blog post, but you can see the full details here.

Buy Support Online via Credit Card

One other new thing we’ve added - you can just buy an Akka.NET support plan online via credit card if you wish. We also still support purchase orders, so contact sales if you need one.

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