Scala Central Meet-up — “Building Event Driven Systems with Akka”
Yeshwanth Kumar sharing knowledge in “Building a CQRS + Event Sourcing Micro-Service with Akka”
WB Advanced Analytics (WBAA) was present at the Scala Central Meet-up which took place at our ING office in London. The team was represented by Yeshwanth Kumar, Data Engineer currently working in the development of WBAA’s Data Analytics Platform. In a full house, Yeshwanth shared knowledge in how to use Akka — a free open-source toolkit for building highly concurrent event-driven applications for Scala and Java.
Scala as a general purpose programming language that combines functional and object-oriented code, can be applied in so many different ways as many are the programmers in the community behind it. The Scala Meet-up is therefore a great opportunity for knowledge sharing in best practices, new ideas and challenges, frameworks like Akka, but also community building for developers.
“The Scala community is usually quite small compared to python or other communities and I have seen it grow drastically over the years, learnt a lot from other Scala talks and developers. This makes me want to give back to the community with what ever I can. I noticed that this specific topic was not covered much and this is something I would be interested to attend if I hadn’t gotten a chance to work on it”-Yeshwanth
Yeshwanth’s talk focused on building a CQRS and Event Sourcing micro-service with Akka to build distributed systems on the cloud using the actor based programming model.
The talk was structured to help the listeners understand the difference in architecting software the conventional way vs applying CQRS/ES model which could be non-intuitive at first for anyone new. It started with the difference in high level architecture, then gradually explored Akka, CQRS clustering and sharding.
“The key takeaway was that anyone could walk out of the talk and start using Akka to build reactive applications. Akka toolkit and some of the patterns mentioned are used across multiple components within the Data Analytics Platform. Callisto is one of the core backends that powers DataScience In A Box which uses Akka.
The event was a great success and the attendees gave positive feedback emphasizing on the clear perspective that was given on such a vast topic and their eagerness to implement the learnings. Yeshwanth got a lot of questions both on stage and off stage, ranging from architectural issues one would face when implementing streaming solutions, to specific questions on using Akka and actor model.
“Implementing CQRS/ES model could sound complex and what stirred the interest was the ability to tackle such complex architectural pattern in an easy way with an existing open-source toolkit”
You can watch Yeshwanth’s full presentation below:
