Introduction to Distributed Publish-Subscribe in Akka.NET
Decentralized Message Brokers in Akka.Cluster
Today we’ll talk about one of the most common communication patterns, which is publish/subscribe, and how to perform it in a distributed environments using Akka.NET. In case if you want to save yourself some time implementing it, its already available as part of a bigger package called Akka.Cluster.Tools
. To install it, you can simply get the latest prerelease version from NuGet:
install-package Akka.Cluster.Tools -pre
Below, we’ll cover the abilities and limitations that come with the Akka.Cluster.Tools.DistributedPubSub implementation.
When EventStream isn’t enough
An idea of distributed publish subscribe came from slightly different design choices than those of the default Akka pub/sub model (EventStream
).
EventStream
has been invented to work with actor systems from the ground up, even in systems that are not inherently distributed. It’s extremely simple, lightweight, and fast. Dead letters - a place where every undeliverable message lands by default - is implemented on top of it.
However, EventStream
comes with some limitations. It works only locally in the scope of the current actor system. This means that you cannot publish/subscribe actors from other nodes and publish messages in a global address space without worrying on which node they live. These limitations were motivation for a separate, cluster-specific publish-subscribe feature.