Migrating Java to the Cloud

Chapter 6. Conclusion

This book outlines a new way of building applications for the next generation of cloud-native software, but this new approach has been decades in the making. Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger first published “A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence” in 1973,¹ the basis of the actor model and the inspiration for much of what we covered in this book. Erlang—a programming language released over 30 years ago—has a message passing model heavily inspired by the actor model.

The cloud is actually one of the newest topics we’ve covered in this book, and it’s quite young compared to actors and Erlang! Even append-only journals are a more traditional style of persisting state than relational databases. The relational model of data—eventually leading to relational databases—was first proposed by E.F. Codd in 1970,² barely more mature than the concept of actors. With virtually unlimited processing and storage now at our disposal, the habit of using relational databases for everything is coming to an end. It’s time to rethink the way we build software for a new era of infrastructure. This is not the time to rest on our laurels. Cloud infrastructure, along with related JVM technologies such as Akka, will usher in a wave of innovation in the development of business software.

Transitioning from traditional ways of building applications to building cloud-native systems is a major leap for all stakeholders in software projects, not only ...