Thoughts on redundant Actors

[Derek Wyatt]

Hi guys,

I've been thinking about a system for redundant Actors and I'm wondering what thoughts people would have with respect to existing functionality in Akka.

I need to have a primary Actor on a machine, with a secondary on another machine and a tertiary on another machine in another region of the world.  My plan is to have upstream components send the same message to all three Actors but only one of them will be primary.  The Actors are holding data that is to be picked up by someone "later", thus private Actor data is 'interesting'.

- Obviously if the primary goes down, then the secondary needs to become primary.
- If the secondary or tertiary go down, we need to replace them.
- The data need to be kept "in sync" (yes, that's a very hairy topic... assume it's easy for the moment :D).

My plan is to have the supervisor be some Actor on the physical machine but set up DeathWatch between the three Actors so that they can take action should any of them kick the bucket.

I haven't seen anything yet that really applies to this - obviously clustering would be a good candidate for this sort of deal but that's gonna have to wait.  Is there anything in the meantime that I might be able to leverage?  Or should I just put something together myself?

Thx,
Derek