[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.