Akka.NET is a port of the Java/Scala Akka framework.

In some ways, the emergence of Akka.NET could be seen as .NET truly “coming of age” - in the sense that other .NET technologies for building web, phone, services, apps etc. are great whereas the distributed .NET story has not been as fully realised – until now with Akka.NET and also Orleans.

In Akka.NET there are two primary constructs: actors and messages.

Actors do work and messages allow actors (and the outside world) to communicate. Actors don’t expose their internal state to other actors, all communication is done with messages.

Messages can be built-in .NET types such as a string or int, or can be custom types containing multiple data items.

Actors perform the work of the system and can essentially do one of four things:

• Receive and respond to incoming messages
• Send messages to other actors
• Create new actors
• Change behaviour in response to an incoming message

Actors have an incoming mailbox and they process one message at a time, then move onto the next message, and so on. If there are no messages to process the actor sits around being lazy, it only reacts to incoming messages.

The ability of actors to change their behaviour allows the simplification of actor code and also allows the building of finite state machines.

Actors can also be distributed across multiple processes/machines. Akka.NET makes this easier by providing “location transparency”, essentially not having to worry about changing our code just because we want to send a message to an actor in a different process. Akka.NET goes even further and can actually deploy instances of actors automatically to remote machines when they are created by simple modification of config – again requiring no code changes.

Akka.NET also supports the idea that systems can be “self-healing”. Through a hierarchy of supervision, parent actors supervise the child actors that they create. If a child actors errors, the parent supervising it can decide how to handle the failure. We can accept the default supervision strategy or create our own as necessary.

For more information on Akka.NET check out the home page, follow the project on Twitter, or check out my Pluralsight course: Building Concurrent Applications with the Actor Model in Akka.NET.

You can start watching with a Pluralsight free trial.

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