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 technologies can be used to build highly available, distributed systems.

We’ve never hosted a live webinar on the subject before and it’s a regularly requested topic - and if this one is popular we’ll definitely do another in the future on Akka.Cluster and other areas such as Akka.Persistence, Akka.NET DevOps, and so forth.

What We’ll Cover

This presentation is 90 minutes long and will be focused on the architectural concepts and possibilities that Akka.Cluster creates. Specifically:

• Why businesses are adopting Akka.Cluster and why this technology is desperately needed;
• How distributed systems are designed using Akka.NET actors and message-based systems;
• What Akka.Cluster does to make this easy; and
• How Akka.Cluster synergizes with modern deployment environments, such as Windows Azure Resource Manager, Azure Service Fabric, * Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and so forth.

Seating is limited. We still have some room available, so please register now: click here to register.

We’ll be taking questions from the audience at the end of the presentation too!

N.B. the material we’re presenting in this webinar does have some overlap with our Akka.Cluster training, but is mostly new material. If you’ve attended our Akka.Cluster training in the past you will still get value out of this talk.

In Case You Can’t Attend

If you aren’t able to attend due to timezones or conflicts, go ahead and register anyway - we’ll send you a recording later the same day.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them...

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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 from sunny Cape Town, South Africa.

The DigiOutsource team, lead by Jean-Pierré Vermeulen, developed an extremely high-speed complex event processing system real-time customer analysis system on top of Akka.NET from conception to production within 5 months, and that system has gone on to increase overall revenue by 35%.

What follows is their story!

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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 out, quantifying this is rather difficult for reasons that are all-too-common in the business world: data silos.

Our “business output” is measured and recorded in a number of disparate, disconnected, off-the-shelf systems. For example: We record our sales through Stripe and Quickbooks Online, but we never correlate them with the end-user interactions with Akka.NET Bootcamp, our YouTube videos, or our blog.

We want a complete picture of what really lead to a sale or to a successful deployment of Akka.NET, because that helps tell us what were good investments of our resources. So in order to do this I started designing a business intelligence application called “Brute” designed to perpetually stream information from all of these sources into a consolidated view. The first version of it is extremely simple but we have plans to expand what it does and the number of systems it can connect to.

Designing an Akka.NET Application

I decided that “Brute” presented a good opportunity for Petabridge to dogfood Akka.NET, especially some of the new modules such as Akka.Streams and Akka.Cluster.Sharding. Thus I’ve spent the past few weeks in the design process writing specifications, models, and documentation.

Protocol-Driven Design

Here’s the catch with designing an Akka.NET application, or really, any actor-based application: your actors aren’t the correct place to begin the design.

Instead, you always want to start the design of any Akka.NET application with the flow of events and information that go through it.

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