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:

1. Instrumenting and monitoring activity from actors inside large Akka.NET applications and exporting it to common, off-the-shelf monitoring tools used by .NET enterprises;
2. Implementing OpenTracing protocols behind the scenes and over the network stack of Akka.NET, so we can provide end-to-end distributed tracing for Akka.NET actors; and
3. Doing all of the above automatically without any instrumentation code or setup of any kind. Phobos can be installed into any existing Akka.NET application and capture all of this data with as little as 5 lines of HOCON configuration.

I’d encourage you to watch the “Introduction to Phobos: Enterprise DevOps for Akka.NET” video we put together which explains this in more detail. It’s only about 5 minutes long.

Integration with Third Party Monitoring and Tracing Services

Phobos is designed to act primarily as instrumentation for your Akka.NET applications; it ships all of the metrics and trace data it records to off-the-shelf monitoring and tracing products. This includes a variety of open source and proprietary tools chosen by our customers and users. We know how hard it can be to introduce new tools inside large enterprise environments, so our goal is to be able to support whatever you and your organization currently use.

And if you’ve never used something like Zipkin or StatsD, we’ve collected some docker-compose scripts you can use to test drive those technologies (with or without Phobos) here.

Trying and Using Phobos

Phobos has been in the works for about a year and we’ve...

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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 on our blog about concepts such as distributing state in Akka.Cluster, sharding data across cluster nodes using Akka.Cluster.Sharding, publishing messages across a cluster, and so on; however, that barely scratches the surface on the possibilities and uses of Akka.Cluster.

So my goal with this post is to provide a bit of an FAQ on some of the most important and central concepts needed to build and operate effective Akka.NET clusters.

Node Reachability vs. Membership

In Akka.Cluster there are two important, similar-looking concepts that every end-user should be able to distinguish:

1. Node reachability - is this node available right now? Can I connect to it?
2. Node membership - is this node a current member of the cluster? Is this node leaving? Joining? Removed?

When many users start working with Akka.Cluster, they operate from the assumption that these two concepts are the same. “If I kill a process that is part of an Akka.NET cluster, that process will no longer be part of the cluster.”

This assumption is incorrect and there’s an important distributed computing concept at work behind this distinction: partition tolerance.

In terms of the CAP theorem, Akka.Cluster provides an AP experience out of the box; Akka.Cluster developers typically trade away some of the cluster’s default availability and partition tolerance (A & P) in exchange for consistency in areas where their domains demand it.

Akka.Cluster’s partition tolerance abilities come from this “reachability” feature; in order to tolerate partitions you have to know where they are and what resources are affected by them...

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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 into production with confidence.

Today we’re putting out a quick update to make everyone aware of the following updates:

1. Petabridge.Cmd v0.3.0 and v0.3.1 have been released and now fully supports Akka.NET v1.3.1 as well as .NET Core. As per Petabridge.Cmd’s v0.3.0 release notes, we’ve broken wire compatibility between all previous versions of pbm and Petabridge.Cmd.Host prior to v0.3.0. We did this in order to guarantee that a single pbm client could communicate seamlessly with both .NET Core and .NET 4.* applications. Please make sure you upgrade your pbm clients along with your hosts when you upgrade.
2. Akka.Monitoring v0.7.0, our open source monitoring extension for Akka.NET applications, is now available and supports Akka.NET v1.3.1. At the moment, however, it does not support .NET Standard - largely due to its dependence on PerformanceCounters and other drivers that do not yet support .NET Standard.

Over the next few months we’re going to be reworking the monitoring story around Akka.NET and Akka.Cluster in order to provide detailed, easy-to-use actor and cluster monitoring instrumentation that works on both .NET Core and .NET 4.5. This is our current top priority and we’ll be providing users on our mailing list with updates once we have something ready to show.

Please let us know in the comments if you have any questions or concerns!

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