Open source application framework provider Lightbend has launched an open beta for its new Akka Serverless platform, which the company claims is the first to remove the barriers that prevent developers from using serverless to build business-critical applications.
Akka Serverless is built on Lightbend’s Akka Platform, a framework for building large-scale distributed applications. The Akka Platform draws more than 20 million downloads annually and is one of the more popular programming models for building cloud native applications running on containers on Kubernetes, said Brad Murdoch, executive vice president of strategy at San Francisco-based Lightbend.
“You probably used Akka today without even realizing it. Because it does things like power Siri and iTunes and Apple Maps, Murdoch said. “It does things like handle every single Starbucks transaction in their digital flywheel — mobile rewards, mobile ordering mobile payments, personalization is done through an AI platform. If you watch Disney+, then that entire streaming platform and all the analytics related to that are all built on an Akka-based platform. So, we know what it takes to build large-scale, high-performance systems.”
However, by bringing a stateful approach to serverless, the Akka Serverless PaaS enables developers to create high-performance backend services and APIs.
Stateful means the computer or program keeps track of the state of interaction, usually by setting values in a storage field designated for that purpose. If a stateful transaction is interrupted, the context and history have been stored so you can more or less pick up where you left off.
“So, what we’ve been focused on over the last two years is how can we take all the goodness that Akka has, and put it under the covers, and make it available to any developer so that all they need to do is basically write the business logic” for their programs, Murdoch said.
Moreover, “What we have worked out is how to best get data that is persisted somewhere,” he said. “It’s actually physically in the database. But it can operate when everything is asynchronous, and everything is in memory at runtime. So, what we’ve worked out are ways to be able to translate that into the Function as a Service model. And that’s really the big innovation that we’ve been able to do.”
With its new distributed state architecture, Akka Serverless eliminates the need for databases for cloud native applications. Thus, the product enables organizations to not be bothered with database administration, maintenance, or even APIs.
Lightbend has been working on Akka Serverless for nearly three years and has had the technology in private beta for the last three months.
Robert Howes, chief technology officer of London-based Judopay, participated in the private beta and said he sees the potential for Akka Serverless to increase the “innovation lens” at Judopay, meaning it has already extended his vision for new services the company could provide.
“It enables an interesting innovation opportunity, because we’ve got our core payments offering, and that typically gets the lion’s share of our bandwidth, our resources, our attention,” Howes said. But he said he sees a broader set of payment methods for broader sets merchants, retailers and business sectors.
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