Exploring Reactive Integrations in Java 8 With Akka Streams, Alpakka, and Kafka

Since its stable release in 2016, Akka Streams is quickly becoming the de facto standard integration layer between various Streaming systems and products. Enterprises like PayPal, Intel, Samsung and Norwegian Cruise Lines see this is a game changer in terms of designing Reactive streaming applications by connecting pipelines of back-pressured asynchronous processing stages. 

This comes from the Reactive Streams initiative in part, which has been long led by Lightbend and others, allowing multiple streaming libraries to interoperate with each other in a performant and resilient fashion, providing back-pressure all the way. But perhaps even more so thanks to the various integration drivers that have sprung up in the community and the Akka team—including drivers for Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Streaming HTTP, Websockets, and much more. 

In this webinar for JVM Architects, Konrad Malawski explores the what and why of Reactive integrations, with examples featuring technologies like Akka Streams, Apache Kafka, and Alpakka, a new community project for building Streaming connectors that seeks to “back-pressurize” traditional Apache Camel endpoints.

• An overview of Reactive Streams and what it will look like in JDK 9, and the Akka Streams API implementation for Java and Scala.  
• Introduction to Alpakka, a modern, Reactive version of Apache Camel, and its growing community of Streams connectors (e.g. Akka Streams Kafka, MQTT, AMQP, Streaming HTTP/TCP/FileIO and more).
• How Akka Streams and Akka HTTP work with Websockets, HTTP, and TCP, with examples in both Java and Scala.

Watch The Full Video + Q/A (56 Min)

More On Streaming For Fast Data And Microservices

Check out some more Lightbend resources:

• What is Alpakka? Intro by the Akka team
• White Paper: Introduction to Reactive Streams, Akka Streams & Akka HTTP
• Case Study: How PayPal uses Akka Streams in Production
• Early Access Program: Lightbend Fast Data Platform