Lightbend has released Akka 22.10, the first release using the recently implemented Business License (BSL) 1.1 license model. New features include support for Java 17, Scala 3.1 and the new Projections over gRPC module.
The Akka distribution contains the modules Akka (core) 2.7.0, Akka HTTP 10.4.0, Akka gROC 2.2.0, Akka Management 1.2.0, Alpakka Kafka 4.0.0, Alpakka 5.0.0, Akka Persistence R2DBC 1.0.0, Akka Persistence JDBC 5.2.0, Akka Persistence Cassandra 1.1.0 and Akka Projections 1.3.0 combined in one umbrella release. This release uses Ubuntu style versioning while previous versions, such as Akka 2.6.20, used semantic versioning. The current version,22.10, was released in October 2022. All modules from this release are binary compatible with the previous, Apache 2 licensed, release.
Akka now includes the new Projections over gRPC module, which allows publish-subscribe communication by using gRPC instead of a message queue or broker. gRPC uses an event journal on the producer side and Akka Projections event processing together with offset tracking on the consumer side. At least once, or exactly once, delivery is supported depending on the type of Projection handler.
Java 17 is now officially supported together with Java 8 and 11. Scala 3.1 is now supported for Akka core together with Scala 2.12 and 2.13. The Akka Persistence R2DBC plugin now supports PostgreSQL and the open source cloud native Yugabyte database.
Dependencies, especially the ones with security vulnerabilities, have been updated to newer versions. Also, Lightbend, the company behind Akka, is now SOC 2 compliant and work is in progress on becoming certified by an external auditor. For the SOC 2 certification, an auditor assesses whether the vendor complies with the five trust principles: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.
Work continues on Akka Edge, for which Projections over gRPC is seen as the first step. Kalix, Lightbend's Platform as a Service, which enables developers to build distributed systems without worrying about the underlying architecture, already uses Projections over gRPC for its service to service communication. Replicated Event Sourcing for reliable multi cluster and multi region event sourcing is planned for the next Akka release.
More details may be found in the release notes.