aws-lambda-java-libs VS Akka

So AWS Lambda is basically a serverless computing service that is offered by AWS. It enables developers to run the code in response to various events. It protects the developers from the pain of managing the servers. Using a serverless execution model helps the developers to handle provision, manage and scale the servers automatically. Through this approach the developers can fully focus on writing the code instead of dealing with other aspects.

The first product that popularized the term “serverless” was AWS Lambda, which is both the prototypical and archetypical function as a service provider. It also has a great name, which pings back to its envisioned place in the cloud of the future. In computer programming, a lambda, often referred to as a lambda function or lambda expression, is a concise way to represent an anonymous function, which is a function without a name. The concept originates from lambda calculus in mathematical logic and has been adopted by many programming languages, each with its own syntax and characteristics.

You can build a custom config rules in 2 ways, using AWS Lambda and CloudFormation Guard. Lambda gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also brings complexity of maintaining. CloudFormation Guard is a bit more lightweight in that regard. Yes, you still need to maintain the logic to determine when your resource is compliant or not. But you need to do this in both cases, thus my go to preference is CloudFormation Guard.

AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

This blog details how you can use some key serverless components from AWS like Amazon Eventbridge, AWS Lambda, and Simple Notification Service to setup a system that will monitor your site (which can be running anywhere) and send emails, text messages, slack messages, and more when the reachability status of your site changes.

I use the OpenWeather API to receive the current temperature data by providing the latitude and longitude coordinates as query strings in the request. A Lambda function invokes the weather API and sends the current temperature value as a custom metric to CloudWatch. I then graph the temperature values on a dashboard and activate an alarm when the temperature sinks below zero degrees Celsius.

After two years, I moved to a Web3 startup where I was given a lead software engineer role. This new role gave me more hands-on experience with AWS, where I've learned to implement serverless technologies like Lambda and DynamoDB.

I discussed a way to control access to endpoints using JSON web tokens and a Lambda authorizer earlier.

In this blog post, you will learn how to build a Serverless solution for entity detection using Amazon Comprehend, AWS Lambda and the Go programming language.

Kotlin also has a construct for asynchronous collections/streams. Kotlin's version of AsyncSequence is called a Flow. Just as Swift's AsyncSequence builds upon prior experience with RxSwift and Combine, Kotlin's Flow APIs build upon earlier stream/collection APIs in the JVM ecosystem: Java's RxJava, Java8 Streams, Project Reactor, and Scala's Akka.

First-class distributed and multicore computing. Swift has first-class “actors” and “distributed” methods. Unison, Erlang, and Elixir are built with distributed being one of the #1 concerns. Though first-class is not super common and I don't really expect it to be because usually libraries are enough (e.g. Scala has Akka and is used WIDELY for distributed); whereas something like linear types and typed effects, you can't emulate in a library.

Akka is a library that implements the actor model for JVM languages. Mainly in Scala, but you can use it in Java too, and maybe others. It doesn't feel as ergonomic as Elixir, but if Elixir is too "out there" for the decision makers in your case, this might be a friendlier alternative.

Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible.

Note Akka, the Java & friends framework, is working with the actor model and have as main inspiration Erlang to mimic some features of the BEAM on top of the JVM.

Looking back at real dates, I started learning the language (Scala) back in 2008 because it was something new and trendy that interested me. I started spending some serious time with it in 2009 (helping out other newcomers and making small contributions to various projects), and then in 2010 became a core contributor to the Akka project (you can find me a little ways down this list: https://github.com/akka/akka/graphs/contributors). For the most part I worked on the features I wanted to, but worked on other things if a user asked nicely. Akka became very popular in the early 2010s, so all of a sudden I had highly sought after skills. Got hired by a London based company and moved myself and my family from Canada over here. But even today, that exposure I got 10 years ago still helps me to land new contracts.

In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561

Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.

Lightbend, the company owning Akka, recently shared a blog post signed by the CEO announcing a license change from Apache 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1, a proprietary license. You can already find it in this PR, merged a couple days ago.

Akka 2.6 is on the open source Apache license, that is unchanged (its not possible for Lightbend to change an existing license). Its only the new Akka 2.7 which has the BSL license, so as long as you don't upgrade you are fine. See https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561.