[halfmatthalfcat]

If you shard your Akka actors, the messages are buffered and passed to the actor when it's initialized on the new node. You get even more stability if you persist your actors backed by a DB or some other persistent store.

Not saying Akka can replace Kafka but many of the issues around availability, durability and reliability have been attempted to be solved in Akka.

[oneplane]

Yeah, that's true. I think the main issue in most cases where I see problems are the ones that only use in-memory stores.