Our Akka.NET Virtual Meetup on August 12th was a huge success - we had about 100 users on the livestream with us and the recording of the meetup has been viewed several hundred times since.

One of the topics I covered during my presentation about using Akka.NET in production at MarkedUp was the concept of stateful applications built with actors - the idea that state can reside within your application rather than outside of it by default, and how it was this idea that made our marketing automation product possible to build.

This tweet from an attendee sums up the realization well:

@Aaronontheweb A key take away for me is Actors are stateful and I do not have to get/post constantly from Redis. Wow that is liberating.

— akshay123 (@akshay123) August 12, 2015

Exactly right! Actors can be stateful - and that means we no longer have to factor round-trip times to SQL Server, Redis, Cassandra, or whatever into the design of our applications. The application already has the state it needs to do its job by the time a request arrives!

The Limitations of Stateless Design

The traditional way of developing web applications is stateless - and that’s a natural consequence of HTTP, itself an inherently stateless protocol.

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Many people in the Akka.NET community have been asking for case studies over the last few weeks, since we shared the MarkedUp case study. There are a ton of production deployments, but getting actual case studies out always has some lag time.

To that end, I wanted to share an email case study that I received from Joel Mueller, an Akka.NET community member, that just BLEW MY MIND (reprinted with permission).

Check out Joel’s story of how Akka.NET changed the trajectory of his business, which is now a part of McGraw Hill—owners of this little thing called Standard & Poor’s—and now proud users of Akka.NET, acquiring SNL Financial for $2 billion:

Joel Mueller, Software Architect, SNL Financial

One of the features of a larger product I’ve been working on for years is a budgeting/forecasting module for community banks. Picture an ASP.NET project that is roughly the equivalent of 200-300 interrelated Excel workbooks, using a custom mostly-Excel-compatible formula engine, lots of business rules, lots of back-end queries against both SQL and Analysis Services, and a front-end in SlickGrid that communicates with the back-end over XHR and Web API. The object model for Forecast instances is (was) stored in ASP.NET session state until changes are saved to the application database. That, of course, means one instance per session, even if two people open the same forecast.

Then, as an afterthought bullet point at the end of a list of other new features being requested, “oh by the way, can you make it work for multiple concurrent users in a single forecast, Google Docs style?”

After I was done freaking out and yelling at people, I sat down to figure out how...

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This is a short update, but an important one.

The first Akka.NET Virtual Meetup will be next Wednesday, August 12 @ 18:30UTC. RSVP Here.

The first ever community-wide meetup for Akka.NET will be taking place next Wednesday, August 12. You can RSVP here.

When is the meetup?

18:30UTC on August 12, 2015. (Click here to see that in your local time zone.) We tried to find a time when people from all over the world could attend, given the geographical diversity of the Akka.NET community.

Why should I come?

I can think of a ton of reasons, but here are three:

• To ask questions & swap ideas with other community members
• To learn about interesting case studies or use cases for Akka that you don’t already know about
• To have connect and have fun with other really smart developers like you!

What will be covered?

This will be a combination of speakers sharing their stories / case studies, and an open forum for Q&A with the core team. In particular, Aaron will be sharing a powerful Akka.NET case study and story. We will also:

• providing an update on the state of the project and its trajectory
• give timelines for upcoming Akka.NET major releases
• have open Q&A for anyone to ask whatever they want!

Where do I join?

RSVP here. Or, if you don’t have a Google account, here is the watch page link.

See you next Wednesday!

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