Designing Reactive Systems

Everything old is new again, at least when it comes to the Actor model. Today, there is renewed interest and adoption of this technology for building distributed systems, especially as cloud concurrency challenges increase. As this report explains, the Actor model provides a relatively simple but powerful way to design and implement reactive applications that can distribute work across clusters of cores and servers.

Author Hugh McKee shows you how Actors behave and interact as humans do when it comes to communicating, and how these similar behavioral patterns provide basic intuition when designing reactive systems. Actors allow your teams to focus on an application’s business logic rather than on low-level protocols, accelerating time-to-market while keeping your infrastructure costs low.

Download this report and discover:

• Why actor-based systems are one of the foundational technologies for creating microservice architectures
• How Actors delegate work by creating other Actors in a supervisor-to-worker relationship
• How Actors manage requests and scale horizontally in large systems
• The difference between traditional systems and actor-based systems
• How an Actor system forms clusters when the flow of work exceeds a system’s capacity to process it
• Why failure detection and failure recovery is an architectural feature of Actor systems
• An example of using Actors to build an Internet of Things (IoT) application

Hugh McKee is a solutions architect at Lightbend. Prior to this role he served as a software architect and engineer at HP, where he helped build the core frameworks and platform that support the organization’s internal application teams. Now he is focused on helping others to discover the significant advantages and joys of building responsive, resilient, elastic, message-based applications.