Akka.Net work queues

Question

I have an existing distributed computing framework built on top of MassTransit and RabbitMQ. There is essentially a manager which responds with work based on requests. Each worker will take a certain amount of items based on the physcial machine specs. The worker then sends completion messages when done. It works rather well and seems to be highly scalable since the only link is the service bus.

I recently evaluated Akka.Net in order to see if that would be a simpler system to implement the same pattern. After looking at it I was somewhat confused at what exactly it is used for. It seems that if I wanted to do something similar the manager would have to know about each worker ahead of time and directly send it work.

I believe I am missing something because that model doesn't seem to scale well.

Sienese

Answer 1

Service buses like MassTransit are build as reliable messaging services. Ensuring the message delivery is primary concern there.

Actor frameworks also use messages, but this is the only similarity. Messaging is only a mean to achieve goal and it's not as reliable as in case of the service buses. They are more oriented on building high performance, easily distributed system topologies, centered around actors as primary unit of work. Conceptually actor is close to Active Record pattern (however this is a great simplification). They are also very lightweight. You can have millions of them living in memory of the executing machine.

When it comes to performance, Akka.NET is able to send over 30 mln messages/sec on a single VM (tested on 8 cores) - a lot more than any service bus, but the characteristics also differs significantly.

On the JVM we now that akka clusters may rise up to 2400 machines. Unfortunately we where not able to test, what the .NET implementation limits are.

You have to decide what do you really need: a messaging library, an actor framework or a combination of both.

Ginseng

Answer 2

I agree with @Horusiath answer. In addition, I'd say that in most cases you can replace a servicebus for the messaging system of an actor model like akka, but they are not in the same class.

Messaging is just one thing that Akka provides, and while it's a great feature, I wouldn't say it's the main one. When analyzing it as an alternative, you must first look at the benefits of the model itself and then look if the messaging capabilities are good enough for your use case. You can still use a dedicated external servicebus to distribute messages across different clusters and keep akka.net exchanging messages inside clusters for example.

But the point is that if you decide to use Akka.net, you won't be using it only for messaging.

Broomfield