Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

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Show Notes

Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

On today’s podcast, Justin Cormack discusses how the modern operating system is being decomposed with toolkits and libraries such as LinuxKit, eBPF, XDP, and what the kernel space service mesh Cilium is doing. Wes Reisz and Justin Cormack also discuss how Cilium differs from service meshes like an Istio, Linkerd2 (previously Conduit), or Envoy. Justin is a systems engineer at Docker. He previously was working with unikernels at Unikernel Systems in Cambridge before being acquired by Docker. (edited)

*Key Takeaways:*
* LinuxKit is an appliance way of thinking about your operating system and is gaining adoption. There are contributions now from Oracle, Cloudflare, Intel, etc. Docker has seen interesting use cases such as customers running LinuxKit on large cloud providers directly on bare metal (more on this coming soon).
* The operating system of today is really unchanged since the Sun workstation of the 90’s. Yet everything else about software has really changed such as automation, build pipelines, and delivery.
* XDP (eXpress Data Path) is a packet processing layer for Linux that lets you run fast in kernel compiled safe program in kernel called eBPF. It’s used for things like packet filtering and encapsulation/decapsulation.
* Cilium is an in-kernel, high performance service mesh that leverages eBPF. Cilium is very good at layer 4 processing, but doesn’t really do the layer 7 things that some of the other services meshes can offer (such as proxying http/1 to http/2)

Justin Cormack on Decomposing the Modern Operating System

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Justin Cormack on Decomposing the Modern Operating System

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