Today, it is now possible to create distributed, microservices-based systems that were impossible to even dream of just a few short years ago. Enterprises across all industries now desire the ability to create systems that can evolve at the speed of the business and cater to the whims of users. We can now elastically scale systems that support massive numbers of users and process huge volumes of data. It is now possible to harden systems with a level of resilience that enables them to run with such low downtime that it’s measured in seconds, rather than hours.
One of the foundational technologies that enables us to create microservices architectures that evolve quickly, that can scale, and that can run without stopping, is systems based on the Actor model. It’s the Actor model that provides the core functionality of Reactive systems, defined in the Reactive Manifesto as responsive, resilient, elastic, and message driven (see Figure 6-1).
In this report, we have reviewed some of the features and characteristics of how actors are used in actor systems, but we have only scratched the surface of how actor systems are being used today.
Figure 6-1. The four tenets of reactive systems
The fact that actor systems can scale horizontally, from a single node to clusters with many nodes, provides us with the flexibility to size our systems as needed. In addition, it is ...
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