As of a few moments ago, we released Akka.NET 1.1 - the biggest feature release we’ve done for Akka.NET since releasing 1.0 last year! We have other major Akka.NET feature releases planned for later this year, but this is the first and one of the most long-awaited ones.

Akka.Cluster is released from beta

The biggest change in this release is the first stable release of Akka.Cluster, which has been in various beta stages since August 2014. During that time it’s been used as a beta package by hundreds of users who have given the Akka.NET project large amounts of bug reports and feedback.

Since that time we’ve covered Akka.Cluster in a huge range of multi-node tests, designed to ensure the cluster behaves correctly under a variety of network conditions (including some rather hostile ones) and it’s performed well.

We’ve also replaced the underlying Helios 1.4.1 transport with a brand new Helios 2.1.1 transport, which delivers up to 5x the throughput with a tremendously lower memory footprint than the previous versions.

Release of the Multi-node TestKit, Multi-node Test Runner

One tool that has proven utterly indispensable in the development of Akka.Cluster, Akka.Remote, Akka.Cluster.Tools, and Akka.Cluster.Sharding is the Akka.Remote.TestKit package - commonly referred to as the “multi-node testkit.”

This library is an extension of the Akka.TestKit that developers use for unit testing simple actors, and it offers capabilities designed for facilitating distributed unit tests for Akka.NET ActorSystems that are using Akka.Remote, Akka.Cluster, or any of the other high availability (HA) modules.

The Akka.Remote.TestKit is designed to allow you to do the to following:

1. Run a unit test across multiple processes simultaneously, simulating how servers or virtual machines would behave in the real-world;
2. Offers a dead-simple Domain Specific Language (DSL) that allows you to describe...

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It’s been a while since we’ve published an official roadmap update for Akka.NET. We are still on track to achieve the goals of the previous roadmap, but with a few minor changes that I will explain here.

Akka.NET 1.1 - Akka.Cluster Release to Market; Akka.Streams Beta

We’ve publicly committed to releasing Akka.NET 1.1 on June 14th, 2016:

Coming soon to @AkkaDotNET - Akka.Cluster stable release. June 14 target ship date, along with the to-do list :p pic.twitter.com/f4UKOASowR

— Aaron Stannard (@Aaronontheweb) May 23, 2016

This release has the following goals:

1. Officially releasing Akka.Cluster to market, signifying “it is ready for full-blown production use;”
2. Deploy Helios 2.0 transport to production, which is significantly faster, more memory efficient, and more reliable than the current Helios 1.4.1-based transport;
3. Releasing the MultinodeTestRunner and the Akka.Remote.TestKit, used for testing distributed systems built with Akka.NET; and
4. Releasing the very first beta of the new Akka.Streams module, which you can read more about here.

Akka.Cluster has been available as a beta package for nearly two years and has had thousands of users. It is currently serving production workloads both on Linux and on Windows for a variety of different types of customers. During this period we have collected lots of bug reports, feedback, and data that has been used to help improve its reliability and performance.

This will be a tremendous opportunity for Akka.NET users to build high availability systems of all shapes and sizes on any cloud they wish.

Akka.NET 1.5 - TLS, New Serializer, Faster Transports

The next major release we have planned following Akka.NET 1.1 is Akka.NET 1.5. This release will introduce some breaking changes at the dependency level.

We are making the following two important changes:

...

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Akka.NET is a .NET implementation of the actor model.

The actor model is an old technology, originating in 1973 as an approach to parallel computing at a time when it looked like the computers of the future might be constructed using thousands of small, low-powered CPUs. History didn’t turn out that way thanks to Moore’s Law; CPUs became faster and faster and modern machines were developed with a small number of very high-powered CPUs.

Despite that, the actor model is immensely popular and runs some of the world’s most important software today. Amazon’s SimpleDb, RabbitMQ, Riak, CouchBase, Goldman Sachs, Motorola, Blizzard Games, Cisco, eBay, Credit Suisse, AMN Healthcare, Bank of America, McGraw Hill Financial, and scores of other major organizations use implementations of the actor model to power mission-critical applications responsible for the world’s largest companies.

So why is the actor model so popular today? Why are so many businesses using it for mission-critical applications?

First Adopters of the Actor Model: Telecoms

The truth of the matter is, the actor model has been popular for a long time through the Erlang programming language. Erlang was the first large-scale, production usable implementation of the actor model - developed originally by Joe Armstrong as a proprietary language at Ericsson in 1986 (open sourced later) to build telephone exchanges. Today it’s used to power the GPRS, 3G, and LTE cellular networks that depend Ericsson’s products.

Although the actor model was originally developed as a means for running applications on types of computer hardware that never really took off, the emergence of electronic computer networks in the late 70s and early 80s gave the actor model an extremely viable commercial application: distributed and concurrent systems.

As the Internet grew and more...

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