More and more companies are choosing to use Akka.NET each day to fulfill mission-critical workloads in tons of different business domains: finance, health care, fleet and vehicle tracking, energy, and more.

Beginning today Petabridge is pleased to offer these companies Akka.NET certified builds, developer support, and production support to give them additional tools for getting the job done with Akka.NET in production.

Certified Akka.NET Build

The idea behind the certified build of Akka.NET is to make it easier to support; each Petabridge support subscription uses a certified build of Akka.NET which is authenticode signed and (optionally) strong named.

Our certified build is also subjected to additional testing and certification beyond the open source implementation before it’s released (specifically, it’s integrated and deployed into supported production environments and run under continuous load prior to being certified.)

Right now the certified build is limited to just the core Akka.NET modules but we will be adding support for specific plug-ins as-needed.

Developer Support

The first flavor of support Petabridge offers is “developer support” - this support plan is designed to assist Petabridge customers with design and developer activities to help head off issues before you go into production.

Each support customer can expect to have their design and development questions answered and issues resolved by an Akka.NET expert promptly.

Production Support

For customers who are already live in production Petabridge offers “production support” for them, to troubleshoot issues that occur in production in real-time. We guarantee fast turn-around times and the ability to get a live human being on the phone promptly (depending on your Service Level Agreement) if an issue occurs.

All of these services should help give any organization looking to leverage Akka.NET in production...

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One of the most frequently asked questions about Akka.Cluster I receive is “how do I reliably distribute state in an Akka.NET Cluster?”

Akka.Cluster is primarily for building highly available, soft real-time applications in server-side environments - and one of the concepts that is essential to delivering “soft real-time” is statefulness.

Stateful applications are becoming more and more common because they execute types of work that are infeasible and impractical with stateless CRUD applications, but they also introduce new types of challenges such as:

• How do I evenly distribute state across my cluster? No “hotspots.”
• How do I find the state I need within my cluster?
• What happens to my state if a stateful node goes down?
• How do I guarantee that my state is modified safely? Consistent histories for state, in other words.

We can address, at a high level, all of these questions using a tool built into Akka.Cluster: consistent hash routers and Cluster.Sharding.

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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...

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