Designing Akka.NET Applications from Scratch Part 2: Hierarchies and SOLID Principles
Decomposing Complex Domains into Understandable Actor Hierarchies
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 slotting actors into some of the interaction points inside the protocol.
But what happens when certain types of interactions are complicated and can’t easily be expressed inside one actor? Or what happens if you need to accumulate state for each individual instance of the protocol?
Think of a protocol like a class. A protocol is a logical unit of encapsulation that expresses some defined behaviors, inputs, and outputs. And just like classes, protocols can be composed - one class can have members that are of another type of class. Small protocols can be combined with other protocols to build large, system-defining behaviors. This is generally how stream processing architectures are actually designed at scale.
An instance of a class is called an object in OOP. In protocol-driven design a “protocol instance” is an instance of a protocol, just like how a class is instance of an object.
Actor Hierarchies and Protocols
A protocol consists of multiple different interactions and can have totally different flows depending on the state of each particular protocol instance. Your Akka.NET actor system can theoretically run hundreds of thousands of concurrent protocol instances at the same time. It’s the goal of a well-designed actor hierarchy to make it performant and easy to manage.
So the first rule of thumb when it comes to designing an actor hierarchy is once again: separate your concerns.
It’s pointless to attempt to design an entire end-to-end actor system before you’ve written any code, because you don’t know what you don’t know yet....
