Hi!

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 8:19 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:

> I've been following AKKA for quite some time, but I'm confused what's the
> purpose of a cluster, in what aspect does it differ form the remote model.
>
> In the very beginning, I thought in one cluster there will only be one
> Akka system whose single actor tree will be partitioned magically into
> different nodes, but later I found it's not the case. It seems to me each
> node may have one or more actor systems and they don't interfere with each
> other nor with actor systems of the same name on other nodes.
>

Yes that is correct, and the reason why we dropped the idea of a "unified"
actor tree is exactly that word: "magic". We discussed it quite extensively
and we found that it is not as useful as it seems, and not the right
abstraction level (and would be a _very_ leaky abstraction anyway).


> So the question again, why akka Cluster and what problems can it solve?
>

Akka clustering provides distributed membership of the participant actor
systems and manages their lifecylce (joining, detecting unreachable nodes,
removing nodes, etc, all without a dedicated master node). In pure remoting
you have to know somehow the systems that are part of the large compound,
and you have to manage these addresses manually (which is hard to do
reliably). Clustering, just like remoting abstracts away location of
ActorRefs, so all actors look the same independently whether they are local
or on another member of the cluster.

On top of membership there are various useful tools:
 - cluster aware routers that can add or remove routees as nodes join or
leave
 - cluster singletons that are guaranteed to be unique in a cluster and
started up on a new node if the node containing the singleton fail
 - various tools on top of persistence+cluster like sharding, which
distributes a set of stateful entities across cluster members and manages
their failover.

-Endre


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-- 
Akka Team
Typesafe - The software stack for applications that scale
Blog: letitcrash.com
Twitter: @akkateam

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>>>>>>>>>>      Check the FAQ: http://akka.io/faq/
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