Akka Clustering and Distributed Cache

[Vikas Hazrati]

Hello,

We have a situation in which we would end up holding large amounts of data in the memory for fast querying. This data would be huge enough to mandate it rolling over to a few more JVMs on different nodes.

Would it be a good idea to

- Use a distributed cache such as JCS/EhCache/Memcache to store data
- Front end this with Akka cluster so that the request is made to a cluster
- Manage cache node addition / deletion with listener over Akka cluster join / leave


The idea is that the request would be made to the Akka cluster which would inturn compute / extract data from the distributed cache and service it back. Thoughts / Questions appreciated.

Regards | Vikas
www.knoldus.com

[Ngoc Dao]

You can have some ideas from project Cleakka:

https://github.com/ngocdaothanh/cleakka

I have not published it yet because the consistent hash cache client is still incomplete.

[Vikas Hazrati]

Thanks Ngoc, I would take a look there. It does seem interesting. Based on your research / work do you think it might be a good idea to bundle in something like a Hazelcast for caching behind an Akka cluster than spinning up your own cache? I am assuming that there would be certain pros with writing your own JSR107 compliant solution. Just checking if there could be a big miss in going with something like Hazelcast / Ehcache in the background.

Regards | Vikas
www.knoldus.com

[Ngoc Dao]

Actually in my Xitrum web framework, I'm including both Akka and Hazelcast (for cache):
http://ngocdaothanh.github.io/xitrum/

Hazelcast is very good.
If you want to use a distributed cache right now, you should use Hazelcast.
Hazelcast itself is distributed, it can run side by side with Akka, not behind Akka.

I'm creating Cleakka because Hazelcast has many other additional features like distributed pubsub, lock etc.
Most of the time I don't need them, so I think it's worth a try to create a small distributed cache library based on Akka.

[Vikas Hazrati]

Perfect, that sounds good. I checked out Xitrium. It looks impressive ! (thumbs up!)

Regards | Vikas
www.knoldus.com

[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Ngoc,

this sounds pretty interesting, fun stuff :-) I bookmarked it for diving into the code later, still wishing for that 36h-day-extension …

Regards,

Roland

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Dr. Roland Kuhn
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Typesafe – Reactive apps on the JVM.
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