I just finished implementing an akka system. I was tasked to build an event-driven auto-scaling self-healing and self-balancing clustered rule processing engine

I just finished implementing an akka system. I was tasked to build an event-driven auto-scaling self-healing and self-balancing clustered rule processing engine, and I knew intuitively something like akka was needed. The learning curve in the beginning was frustratingly steep, and imho the only way to really grok akka is to implement something significant with it. I still feel I haven’t fully grasped its nuances, but eventually it became almost as routine to model everything as actors and messages as it was to model rest api’s with models and controllers. It’s a different way of thinking. Akka actually uses futures, when you “ask” an actor (send a message and receive the promise of a reply). I would say the primary benefit akka offers is changing the level of abstraction and forcing a proper modelling of the logic as message pipelines.