[29athrowaway]

I used Akka cluster many years ago.

One of the problems I encountered was that to finding actors in remote actor systems. i.e.: you have a unique actor responsible for X, living somewhere in your cluster and you need to know its name as well as the IP address of the actor system where it is running.

A message queue solves this problem, but that was not the approach I took.

My solution was to implement an actor discovery system on top of Zookeeper. Using that, I could have a cluster-wide unique actors.

[halfmatthalfcat]

They have Cluster Singletons that alleviate this concern now. You don't need to know their physical location in the cluster. All you need to do is ask the cluster for a pointer to the Singleton and you can message it directly.

[29athrowaway]

That's cool. I wish I had this in 2014.

[acjohnson55]

I used Cluster Singleton with much success, starting at the very beginning of 2016: https://github.com/artsy/atomic-store/

[29athrowaway]

Are you still using Akka these days?

[acjohnson55]

Sorry for the delay!

Nope. The two companies I have since worked have mature products that aren't built on the JVM or Scala. But I'd absolutely consider it if I were to build a system with similar constraints again.

There was a big learning curve, but the end result was a system that was built largely correctly, on a tight timeline, solving some tricky technical and business challenges.