Lightbend has announced the latest version of its Akka distributed computing platform, which incorporates a new and unique programming model that enables developers to build an application once and have it work across both Cloud and Edge environments.

Akka provides a singular programming model that eliminates the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers the Edge has posed for development teams wanting to bridge the Edge and Cloud. Developers focus on business logic, not complicated, time-consuming tool integrations. As a result, businesses can harness, distribute, and fully utilize the vast amount of intelligent data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated.

Some specific capabilities of the latest version of Akka include:

• Adaptive Data Availability
  Projections over gRPC for the Edge – asynchronous, brokerless service-to-service communication
• Scalability and efficiency improvements to handle the large scale of many Edge services
• Programmatically defined low-footprint active entity migration
• Temporal, geographic, and use-based migration
  Run Efficiently In Resource Constrained Environments
• Support for more constrained environments such as running with
• GraalVM native image and lightweight Kubernetes distributions
• Support for multidimensional autoscaling and scale to near zero
• Lightweight storage, for running durable actors at the far edge
  A Single Programming Model for the Cloud-to-Edge Continuum
• Akka single programming model keeps the code, the tools, the patterns, and the communication the same, regardless if it is Cloud, Edge, or in between
• Seamless Integration – works at the Edge or in the Cluster automatically
  Empowering New Innovation
• Active/Active digital twins, and many other new use cases
• No dealing with complicated logic to handle network segregation
• Focus on business logic and flow (not on tool integrations)

Akka’s new Cloud-to-Edge capabilities are available today.