Apache Flink VS Akka

Compare Apache Flink vs Akka and see what are their differences.

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Apache Flink Akka
9 33
23,107 12,918
1.0% 0.2%
9.9 9.4
5 days ago 6 days ago
Java Scala
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Apache Flink

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Flink. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-15.
  • First 15 Open Source Advent projects
    16 projects | dev.to | 15 Dec 2023
    7. Apache Flink | Github | tutorial
  • I keep getting build failure when I try to run mvn clean compile package
    2 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 8 Apr 2023
    I'm trying to use https://github.com/mauricioaniche/ck to analyze the ck metrics of https://github.com/apache/flink. I have the latest version of java downloaded and I have the latest version of apache maven downloaded too. My environment variables are set correctly. I'm in the correct directory as well. However, when I run mvn clean compile package in powershell it always says build error. I've tried looking up the errors but there's so many. https://imgur.com/a/Zk8Snsa I'm very new to programming in general so any suggestions would be appreciated.
  • We Are Changing the License for Akka
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2022
  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    21 projects | dev.to | 2 Jun 2022
    Apache Drill, Druid, Flink, Hive, Kafka, Spark
  • Computation reuse via fusion in Amazon Athena
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 May 2022
    It took me some time to get a good grasp of the power of SQL; and it really kicked in when I learned about optimization rules. It's a program that you rewrite, just like an optimizing compiler would.

    You state what you want; you have different ways to fetch and match and massage data; and you can search through this space to produce a physical plan. Hopefully you used knowledge to weight parts to be optimized (table statistics, like Java's JIT would detect hot spots).

    I find it fascinating to peer through database code to see what is going on. Lately, there's been new advances towards streaming databases, which bring a whole new design space. For example, now you have latency of individual new rows to optimize for, as opposed to batch it whole to optimize the latency of a dataset. Batch scanning will be benefit from better use of your CPU caches.

    And maybe you could have a hybrid system which reads history from a log and aggregates in a batched manner, and then switches to another execution plan when it reaches the end of the log.

    If you want to have a peek at that here are Flink's set of rules [1], generic and stream-specific ones. The names can be cryptic, but usually give a good sense of what is going on. For example: PushFilterIntoTableSourceScanRule makes the WHERE clause apply the earliest possible, to save some CPU/network bandwidth further down. PushPartitionIntoTableSourceScanRule tries to make a fan-out/shuffle happen the earliest possible, so that parallelism can be made use of.

    [1] https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/5f8fb304fb5d68cdb0b3e3c...

  • Avro SpecificRecord File Sink using apache flink is not compiling due to error incompatible types: FileSink<?> cannot be converted to SinkFunction<?>
    3 projects | /r/apacheflink | 14 Sep 2021
    [1]: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.avro/avro-maven-plugin/1.8.2 [2]: https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink-connectors/flink-connector-files/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/connector/file/sink/FileSink.java [3]: https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-master/docs/connectors/datastream/file_sink/ [4]: https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/c81b831d5fe08d328251d91f4f255b1508a9feb4/flink-end-to-end-tests/flink-file-sink-test/src/main/java/FileSinkProgram.java [5]: https://github.com/rajcspsg/streaming-file-sink-demo

Akka

Posts with mentions or reviews of Akka. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-06.
  • Modern Async Primitives on iOS, Android, and the Web
    4 projects | dev.to | 6 Dec 2023
    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.
  • What are the current hot topics in type theory and static analysis?
    15 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 8 May 2023
    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.
  • Anything close beam/otp for other languages?
    7 projects | /r/elixir | 7 Apr 2023
    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.
  • Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2023
  • About Elixir and the microservices architecture
    3 projects | dev.to | 14 Dec 2022
    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.
  • Akka will no longer be Open Source
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Sep 2022
    If I hear about Actor model, the first thing that comes to my mind is the popular Open Source library Akka.
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Sep 2022
    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.
  • Why We Are Changing the License for Akka
    2 projects | /r/scala | 7 Sep 2022
    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.
  • We Are Changing the License for Akka
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2022
    Here is Akka's dependency specification: https://github.com/akka/akka/blob/main/project/Dependencies....

    How many of these would have to opt for this source available approach before Akka would no longer be sustainable?

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2022
    I don't think that the Akka change is aimed at cloud providers. Akka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications for Java and Scala [1]. It's not possible for AWS to offer their own "Akka service" the way they offered Redis through ElastiCache. This change affects companies that build software using Akka, many of which may not be software-focused. For example, here's a case study of an oilfield services company that uses Akka:

    https://www.lightbend.com/blog/low-cpu-utilization-fortune-5...

    [1] As found on https://akka.io/

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Flink and Akka you can also consider the following projects:

Vert.x - Vert.x is a tool-kit for building reactive applications on the JVM

Apache ZooKeeper - Apache ZooKeeper

Hazelcast - Hazelcast is a unified real-time data platform combining stream processing with a fast data store, allowing customers to act instantly on data-in-motion for real-time insights.

Trino - Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)

Hystrix - Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.

JGroups - The JGroups project

Lagom - Reactive Microservices for the JVM

Atomix - A Kubernetes toolkit for building distributed applications using cloud native principles

Deeplearning4j - Suite of tools for deploying and training deep learning models using the JVM. Highlights include model import for keras, tensorflow, and onnx/pytorch, a modular and tiny c++ library for running math code and a java based math library on top of the core c++ library. Also includes samediff: a pytorch/tensorflow like library for running deep learning using automatic differentiation.

Finagle - A fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system

Apache Storm - Apache Storm

Elixir - Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications