This is the last Tech Digest in 2016. While hopefully all of you enjoy some downtime during the holiday season, we end this year with a recap of the happenings in our community in December.

In this webinar aimed at Architects and Developers working with more traditional Java environments, Lightbend’s Sean Walsh and Duncan DeVore take us on a journey that goes beyond just asynchronous programming and into the very basics of designing Reactive systems as a whole...

Most likely, your job is heavily focused on helping your organization modernize for the digital era. As the days of purely Object-Oriented Programming and related frameworks come to a close, enterprises migrating to distributed, cloud infrastructures are embracing a different approach: the Actor Model.

Winter is coming. But nothing stops the November Tech Digest on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala!

In this talk for Architects and Dev Managers by Akara Sucharitakul, Principal MTS for Global Platform Frameworks at PayPal, we look at how back-pressure based on Akka Streams and Kafka is being used in PayPal's mission-critical production systems to handle very bursty workloads.

We proudly announce the launch of Lightbend Solution Architect Hugh McKee's concise, 43-page O'Reilly book Designing Reactive Systems: The Role Of Actors In Distributed Architecture, which covers what your team should know about the Actor Model from the ground up. In less than 1 hour.

Recently, the Lightbend team sponsored O'Reilly SACon London and met hundreds of architects, executives and developers interested in modernizing with Reactive technologies. In this interview with Mike Henderson, VP of Content at O'Reilly, Lightbend's Duncan DeVore, co-author of the Manning book Reactive Application Development, talks about the differences between Reactive Programming (one component of Reactive systems) and Reactive System Design, which looks at a much broader whole.

Starting into Autumn with the September Update on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala. Now it’s time to sit back, grab a coffee and relax while you read through this month’s highlights!

August is typically a month filled with vacation, sunburn and the other joys of summer. It's a month where we all take it a bit slower and try to gather more energy for the rest of the year. But it turns out that our amazingly active communities never sleep. And there's been plenty of news and highlights. This Tech Digest is designed to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster. So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the most important information of last month in a single post.

Earlier this summer, Lightbend CTO & Co-founder (and creator of Akka) Jonas Bonér  and Enterprise Advocate Kevin Webber were seeing their vacation time more as a far-off dream than a plausible reality. Jonas had just published the free O'Reilly book titled Reactive Microservices Architecture––called "the best single source of the key ideas needed to design modern Reactive systems" by John Nestor––and we wanted to make it even easier to get the principles of microservices architectures into the hands of Enterprise Architects, CTOs, App Dev Managers and other decision makers. With the story of going Reactive with microservices in place, Jonas and Kevin set to work breaking down this concise, valuable book into a three-part series...

Do you have plans for October 4th and 5th? We'll be at Reactive Summit, eating BBQ at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas, with Susan Potter, Fred Hebert, Helena Edelson, Peter Alvaro, and Jonas Bonér, talking about how to build, run and manage Reactive systems using microservices and fast data pipelines.

Welcome to our first Lightbend Tech Digest! It's so exciting to keep finding new places where great technical content is published as our communities continue to grow. Inspired by the amazing efforts of our friends like SoftwareMills' Scala Times, Cake Solutions team blog, the Knoldus blog and many others, we wanted to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster.

In this talk by Jamie Allen, noted author, speaker and Senior Director of Global Solution Architects at Lightbend, we will focus on how to avoid traditional anti-patterns when building your next generation of services. Jamie describes the requirements for constructing elastic, resilient service-based applications that can handle tremendous amounts of data in real time, and to discuss the new Lightbend framework for Microservices-based applications called Lagom.

In our third and final part of The Enterprise Architect's Intro to Microservices, we again welcome Lightbend CTO/co-founder and Akka creator Jonas Bonér to continue where we left off in the six characteristics of Reactive Microservices presented earlier with a simple premise (in the spirit of Carl Hewitt): one microservice is no microservice–they come in systems.

Recently we announced our Series C funding round in a press release titled Lightbend Closes $20 Million in Series C Funding Led by Intel Capital, and we felt like it made sense to give a little more context for our community with these follow up questions.

In Part 2 of our series for Enterprise Architects, Lightbend CTO and Akka creator Jonas Bonér shares the 6 characteristics of Reactive Microservices that matter for having responsive, elastic, resilient systems.

As we continue to help organizations modernize their legacy systems with Microservices architecture, our latest mini-book arrives right on time. We are happy to announce the availability of Developing Reactive Microservices: Enterprise Implementation in Java, a new O'Reilly mini-book authored by Java Champion and Lightbend Developer Advocate, Markus Eisele (@myfear).

In Part 1, Enterprise Advocate Kevin Webber will review a bit of history of application development, from the early days of monoliths and SOA to the emergence of Microservice architectures. We will review the drawbacks of heritage architectures and how the principles of Reactive can help you build isolated services that are scalable, resilient to failure, and combine with other services to form a cohesive whole.

In this talk targeted at Architects and Developers, Akka engineer Konrad Malawski bends your parameters with regards to application design and asynchronous execution models. We uncover a number of rules that serve as a guide in designing concurrent distributed applications, how those apply to Akka, and how they can help you in daily app development.

Following last week's release of Reactive Microservices Architecture: Design Principles for Distributed Systems by Lightbend CTO and creator of Akka, Jonas Bonér, O'Reilly Radar podcast host Brian Foster sits down to discuss the rise of Microservices and distributed systems based on Reactive principles.

Lightbend CTO Jonas Bonér has teamed up with O'Reilly Media to publish a new report called Reactive Microservices Architecture: Design Principles for Distributed Systems. Register to get this free report in PDF, MOBI and EPUB formats (or all three!)

In this presentation by Dr. Roland Kuhn, we explore several architecture elements that are commonly found in reactive systems, like the circuit breaker, various replication techniques, and flow control protocols. These patterns are language agnostic and also independent of the abundant choice of reactive programming frameworks and libraries. They are well-specified starting points for exploring the design space of a concrete problem: thinking is strictly required!

Microservices-based systems have been gaining a lot of attention lately. Martin Fowler, the well-known co-author of the Agile Manifesto, has produced a popular explanation of microservices with James Lewis that has been getting a lot of traction with developers. Industry analyst Gartner is emphasizing the importance of microservices within its enterprise clientele, ranking microservice-based architecture (MSA) within its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015...

Our whole company is excited about the results from our Going Reactive 2016 survey. So, I asked the source (and my teammate buddy), Oliver White, to give us an overview.

With this survey, in which over 3000 respondents participated, we we set out to understand the journey of Going Reactive and uncovered some interesting adoption trends around microservices and Fast Data along the way. Big thanks to all of you who participated! We enjoyed pulling this report together and hope you enjoy seeing how your peers are viewing the Reactive landscape.

Were you able to attend our latest webinar? If not, here's your chance to catch our educational go-to guy get excited about the lastest in our Reactive Platform. Typesafe’s Senior Director of Global Services, Jamie Allen, walks you through Reactive Platform 1.0, with added features for more elasticity and resilience to address the challenges of today's main business requirements.

Missed Devoxx Belgium 2015? That's ok, revisit the presentations of Typesafers Konrad Malawski, Viktor Klang, Jonas Bonér and Lutz Huehnken.

Whether you call them microservices (the industry favorite), picoservices, uniservices, decoupled services, or even “SOA done right”, one thing is clear: enterprise deployment of microservices-based applications is no longer a fringe concept enjoyed only by a handful of early adopters. 

Jerome Dubreuil and his colleagues on the SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimedia Interactions) team at Samsung saw a number of technical obstacles holding IoT developers back. The SAMI group made some key architecture decisions in the earliest days of building out an innovative ioT data platform, and from day one they knew that they would be building their platform following Reactive principles. Central to their efforts were the Scala and Play Framework for rapid prototyping and developer productivity, and Akka for the data transformation and WebSocket layers. Our case study looks at some of those key decisions that allowed SAMI to ship such an ambitiously scoped platform in less than two years.

With nearly 4000 people registering for the complete Reactive Revealed series, we're happy to conclude this exposed look into the bits and pieces that have defined the Reactive Manifesto, the Reactive Streams Initiative, and also the driving force behind our Reactive Platform and ConductR. In Part 1, Akka engineer Konrad Malawski discusses the role of asynchronous, non-blocking I/O, back-pressure and the message-driven vs. event-driven approach in Reactive systems. In Part 2, Typesafe deputy-CTO Viktor Klang discusses how elasticity, scalability, location transparency and other traits are at the heart of Reactive systems. In this final part, Jonas Bonér, Typesafe CTO/co-founder and creator of Akka, explores the nature of Reactive systems and how they maintain resiliency with an infrastructural approach designed to welcome failure often and recover gracefully. 

I’ve been working for several years to try to find a meaningful way to describe the core concepts of building efficient, Reactive applications - being asynchronous and non-blocking while minimizing concurrency and supporting linear scalability by enhancing parallelism. That is a veritable soup of esoteric terms that are difficult to grasp for even the most experienced developers. Yet understanding them is critical to building truly Reactive applications.

In the past few months, I think I may have found a way to express these concepts more clearly. It also highlights some other interesting concepts, such as pipelining, batching, fork/join and Amdahl’s Law via an everyday metaphor. This kind of real-world analogy has always helped me understand concepts, and when I’ve run through this one with customers, they’ve found it to be helpful as well.

Drawn by the success of high-traffic enterprises like Twitter, Netflix, Gilt, PayPal, and Condé Nast, some people have been led to believe that Microservices are the magic bullet, automatically providing a better way to build and deploy applications. This is only partially true: Microservices are independent services (or applications) that can be deployed, scaled and updated without affecting the rest of the system. This style of architecture makes system responsiveness, resilience and elastic scalability much more attainable. 

Understanding Async, Non-Blocking, Concurrent, Parallel and More

I’ve been working for several years to try to find a meaningful way to describe the core concepts of building efficient, Reactive applications - being asynchronous and non-blocking while minimizing concurrency and supporting linear scalability by enhancing parallelism. That is a veritable soup of esoteric terms that are difficult to grasp for even the most experienced developers. Yet understanding them is critical to building truly Reactive applications...

With the Reactive Manifesto now embraced by over 11,000 people and the Reactive Streams initiative in full swing with a 1.0.0 launch, we are seeing more interest in "Going Reactive" than ever before. Organizations large and small ask us questions like:

• What does Reactive really mean and why should we care?
• What does “Going Reactive” mean for our Development and Operations teams?
• How can Reactive systems help us improve system resilience and scale elastically to accommodate bursty traffic? 
• What are the business drivers and market forces that we should be aware of, and how can my organization start the journey towards modernizing our existing applications and infrastructure?

From Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang and Konrad Malawski, co-authors of the Reactive Manifesto and contributors to the Reactive Streams initiative, we have set out to produce a three-part “Reactive Revealed” series to give an interactive opportunity for enterprise architects and software developers (we even have some goodness for Operations and Executives too) to get started with understanding Reactive from the beginning, providing an overview of the technological foundation behind it all. 

Ed Callahan, Senior Engineer at Typesafe, kicks off the series with a broad overview of Typesafe ConductR, a solution for managing Typesafe Reactive Platform-based applications using Play, Akka and Scala or Java across a cluster of machines. In this series, we’ll see how ConductR manages this new wave of message-driven, elastic, resilient and responsive applications while complementing existing configuration and management tools and developer workflow...

In April, 2013, we published a blog post about Enterprise Scala Adoption Tips, but the time has come for an update. Not only that, we need to focus on how to help enterprise organizations adopt Scala and also the Typesafe Reactive Platform in general. Many enterprises make the decision to leverage Akka and Play Framework from the Java API, which we fully support.

As more enterprise organizations adopt Scala/Akka/Play, we find it important to help them engage the community effectively. This involves providing them with information about where they can find resources to empower their developers to learn as much about these technologies as possible, as well as to directly engage with the community on a daily basis. By following these steps, the likelihood of successfully adopting these technologies is much higher.

Exciting news! The second iteration of the "Principles of Reactive Programming" Coursera class led by Martin Odersky, Erik Meijer & Roland Kuhn, will start on April 13. Since the announcement a few weeks ago, we have seen more than 12,340 enrollments.

While Reactive application development is off to a roaring start and becoming mainstream, this leads to demands on Operations that are simply not met by yesterday’s software architectures and technologies. The pressure facing enterprises to manage resilient, responsive systems is brutal, yet most existing technologies available today are not designed to deploy and manage Reactive systems running on clusters. It’s due to this fact that Operations face a higher risk of downtime by using inappropriate tools/practices at a time when being unavailable is more costly than ever. So why is this happening? Well, it's not 2005 anymore–and why that's a problem for Operations is explained here...

Next week we're hosting three webinars that showcase how Typesafe technologies are used in major retail organizaitons. Check out the speaking list below and register to attend the live event or receive an email link to the recordings. 

Get ready for a meeting of the most prolific minds at the heart of the Reactive community. On November 18th, Typesafers Jonas Boner, Roland Kuhn, Ryan Knight and Dean Wampler will join Martin Thompson, Ben Christensen and other luminaries for the second React Conf. React is a  mixture of talks, speaker clinics and workshops that offer a an articulate and coherent journey through the reactive stack, trait by trait, UI to database.

A little over a year ago, a group of us published the Reactive Manifesto as a way to address new requirements in application development and provide a common vocabulary to discuss complex concepts. To date, the Manifesto has received over 6,813 signatures and has sparked what I consider to be a healthy debate in our community about what the principles for modern application infrastructure might be.

At Typesafe, we’re incredibly excited about the work being done around the Reactive Streams and Akka Streams projects. The Akka team is addressing major challenges we’ve been seeing from developers working with streaming data, and they’re making major headway resolving back pressure issues.  

It’s always nice to hear about real-life implementations of these projects, so we’d like to share a recent interview with Simeon Fitch, Director of Software Architecture at Elder Research, Inc. Simeon used Akka Streams to handle I/O bottlenecks in his text processing engine. In our Q&A, Simeon outlines how he ported over his existing actor system to akka-streams, hurdles he encountered along the way, and, best of all, results!

Today, we were really lucky enough to have John Nestor and Dragos Manolescu from the Whitepages present their experiences converting from
Ruby to Reactive.

We are very happy and excited to release the first preview of Akka HTTP’s core module based on an updated preview of Akka Streams. It is the fruit of the collaboration between the Spray and Akka teams and aims to bring you fully reactive HTTP streams.

This week we published a case study with our partners at SoftwareMill. Read how SoftwareMill helped Yap.TV develop a high-performance, resilient and scalable backend with Scala, Akka and Spray.io in "Yap.TV Goes Reactive!"

Last week we hosted a webinar, Introducing Reactive Streams, with Roland Kuhn, Akka tech lead. Over 900 people registered for the event, and we had some really great questions submitted for the Q&A. Konrad Malawski, software engineer at Typesafe, responded to folks in real time, but we thought our readers might find some of the conversations interesting, so we’re sharing on our blog!

Watch our newest webinar, "Introducing Reactive Streams" with Roland Khun, Akka tech lead at Typesafe.

Today we're excited to announce two new customer success stories, Tomax and Walmart Canada! Both cases support the traction reactive programming has made in the retail and ecommerce space, particularly when paired with Gilt's case study, which we published several months ago. Below is a quick summary of the accounts, we encourage you to read all three case studies to see how Typesafe's technologies are powering a new wave of retail apps!

Today we are excited to reveal early preview releases of two major projects the Akka team has been involved in to improve data streaming on the JVM:  Akka Streams and Reactive Streams.

Reactive Streams is a collaboration between heavy hitters in the area of streaming data on the JVM and Akka Streams. The Akka implementation of the Reactive Streams specification effort is based on Actors as its mechanism for execution, distribution and resilience.

In a short video interview, Lightbend co-founder and Scala creator, Martin Odersky, discusses our Reactive Platform, how it upholds principles of Reactive systems and shares his perspective on Java 8.

Yesterday, James Ward, developer advocate at Typesafe, presented a webinar on building Reactive Apps with the Typesafe Platform. For those of you who missed out, or simply want to rewatch and share the session with friends and colleagues, we recorded James' presentation for your viewing pleasure!

Last week a group of us released a document that I (Jonas Bonér) have been working on lately; The Reactive Manifesto. I wrote the first version and it has since then been enhanced through the contributions of various people and evolved into the blueprint for writing Reactive Applications that you can see today. Some of the early contributors and reviewers have been people like Erik Meijer, Martin Odersky, Greg Young, Martin Thompson, Roland Kuhn, James Ward and Guillaume Bort, and during the first week more than 500 people have signed the manifesto.