Akka module which provides an elegant solution for communicating between actors across the network is called Akka Remoting.

1. Akka Remoting
By:
Girish Ch. Bharti
Software Consultant
Knoldus Software

2. Agenda
● What is akka remoting?
● Akka remoting capabilities
● Akka remoting features
● Challenges akka remoting solves
● Enabling akka remote
● Demo

3. What is remoting?

4. What is akka remoting?
“Akka module which provides an elegant
solution for communicating between actors
acros network are called Akka Remoting”

5. What is akka remoting?

6. Use cases
● Transaction processing (Online Gaming, Finance/Banking,
Trading, Statistics, Betting, Social Media, Telecom)
● Service backend (any industry, any app)
● Concurrency/parallelism (any app)
● Simulation (master/worker)
● Batch processing (any industry)
● Communications Hub (Telecom, Web media, Mobile media)
● Gaming and Betting (Online gaming, betting)
● Complex Event Stream Processing

7. Akka remoting capabilities
● Location transparency with RemoteActorRef
● Remote addressing
● Remote messaging
● Remote deployment
● Multiple network transports

8. Location transparency with
RemoteActorRef
● Write code that looks like it's communicating with
local actors
● But with just a few configuration settings your
actors can begin communicating with actors
hosted in remote processes in a way that's fully
location transparent to your code.
● RemoteActorRef:
Internal Api that is used when referencing the
Actor on a different node than its "home" node.

9. Remote addressing
● Address
- Protocol
- System
- Host
- Port
● ActorPath:
Actor path is a unique path to an actor that shows
the creation path up through the actor tree to the
root actor

10. Remote addressing

11. Addressing a Remote ActorSystem

12. Remote Messaging

13. Remote deployment

14. Multiple network transports
● TCP
● UDP
● SSL
● User defined

15. Akka remoting features
● Distributed by Default
● Ways in which Transparency is Broken
● How is Remoting Used?
● Peer-to-Peer vs. Client-Server
● Marking Points for Scaling Up with Routers

16. Distributed by Default
● Everything in Akka is designed to work in a
distributed setting
● All interactions of actors use purely message
passing and everything is asynchronous.
● Remote to local instead of trying to go from
local to remote (A Note on Distributed
Computing- Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant,
November 1994)

17. Ways in which Transparency is
Broken
● All messages sent over the wire must be
serializable
● Everything needs to be aware of all interactions
being fully asynchronous
● Probability for a message to be lost is much
higher than within one JVM
● On single JVM it is closed to 0 but not 0

18. How is Remoting Used?
● Purely driven by configuration
● Application can be scaled out without having to
touch the code.
● Only piece of the API which allows
programmatic influence on remote deployment
is Props contain a field which may be set to a
specific Deploy instance

19. Peer-to-Peer vs. Client-Server

20. Peer-to-Peer vs. Client-Server
● If a system A can connect to a system B then
system B must also be able to connect to
system A.
● There is no system that only accepts
connections, and there is no system that only
initiates connections.

21. Marking Points for Scaling Up with
Routers

22. Marking Points for Scaling Up with
Routers

23. Challenges Remoting solves
● How to address actor systems living on remote hosts.
● How to address individual actors on remote actor
systems.
● How to turn messages to bytes on the wire.
(Serialization)
● How to manage low-level, network connections (and
reconnections) between hosts, detect crashed actor
systems and hosts, all transparently.

24. Enabling akka remote

25. Build.sbt

26. Enabling akka remote
● Transport (Communication protocol)
● Address (Actor addresses)
● Endpoint (Host:Port)
● Association (Active Link between nodes)

27. Enabling akka remote

28. While starting both actor systems

29. The Association Process

30. The Association Process

31. Addressing a Remote ActorSystem

32. Types of Remote Interaction
● Akka has two ways of using remoting:
● Lookup :
Used to look up an actor on a remote node with
actorSelection(path)
● Creation :
Used to create an actor on a remote node with
actorOf(Props(...), actorName)

33. Demo

34. The Use Case: Runtime population

35. Code in action

36. Refrences
● Https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.5/remoting.html
● https://getakka.net/articles/Remoting/
● https://petabridge.com/blog/akka-internals-how-
akka-remote-connections-work/

37. Thank You