Deploying Akka

[Zach Cox]

Ben - great Akka talk yesterday! How are you deploying your Akka
projects on your servers? Just a .jar that uses the microkernel, or
a .war in some container? Or something else?

Thanks,
Zach

[Ben Metz]

Thx.  Really enjoyed your Lift prez as well... I might have caught the Lift bug.

We are currently "deploying fat jars" :)  So no container.  Wade put this exact question to Coda Hale (Yammer) and Alex Payne(BankSimple/Twitter) about deploying Scala when we were at OSCON last year.  They both said just "deploy fat jars, and restart processes".  

We've been using https://github.com/bwmcadams/sbt-akka-bivy which makes it pretty easy to deploy akka apps.  

However, this project https://github.com/codahale/assembly-sbt just hit my radar this week.  We'll have a whirl with it and post back on this thread.  Looks like magic sauce tho :)

[Zach Cox]

Wow those sbt plugins are new to me and look great, thanks for passing along!

One other related question: when you "restart processes" are you
concerned at all about losing messages that were in actor mailboxes in
ram before the restart?

[Ben Metz]

Yes.  I am concerned.  One answer to the problem is persistent mailboxes, which Jonas is working on right now.  You'll have your choice of persistent back-ends(basic Journal(file-system), BeanStalk, Redis, Mongo, ZooKeeper, etc...).  It remains to be seen if that will be in OS version or commercial. 

Event Sourcing, *can be helpful* for this problem as well... 

That being said, the problem makes you think hard about architecture and how to bring down(and bring back up) certain parts of your system.  

[Ben Metz]

http://images2.memegenerator.net/ImageMacro/2756015/Deploy-fat-jars-Restart-processes.jpg?imageSize=Medium&generatorName=Joseph-Ducreux

On Jan 26, 2:32 pm, Ben Metz <ben.m...@t8webware.com> wrote:
> Yes.  I am concerned.  One answer to the problem is persistent mailboxes,
> which Jonas is working on right now.  You'll have your choice of persistent
> back-ends(basic Journal(file-system), BeanStalk, Redis, Mongo, ZooKeeper,
> etc...).  It remains to be seen if that will be in OS version or
> commercial.
>
> Event Sourcing, *can be helpful* for this problem as well...
> That being said, the problem makes you think hard about architecture and how
> to bring down(and bring back up) certain parts of your system.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Zach Cox <zcox...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wow those sbt plugins are new to me and look great, thanks for passing
> > along!
>
> > One other related question: when you "restart processes" are you
> > concerned at all about losing messages that were in actor mailboxes in
> > ram before the restart?
>

> > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Ben Metz <ben.m...@t8webware.com> wrote:
> > > Thx.  Really enjoyed your Lift prez as well... I might have caught the
> > Lift
> > > bug.
> > > We are currently "deploying fat jars" :)  So no container.  Wade put this
> > > exact question to Coda Hale (Yammer) and Alex Payne(BankSimple/Twitter)
> > > about deploying Scala when we were at OSCON last year.  They both said
> > just
> > > "deploy fat jars, and restart processes".

> > > We've been usinghttps://github.com/bwmcadams/sbt-akka-bivywhich makes

> > it
> > > pretty easy to deploy akka apps.

> > > However, this projecthttps://github.com/codahale/assembly-sbtjust hit

> > my
> > > radar this week.  We'll have a whirl with it and post back on this
> > thread.
> > >  Looks like magic sauce tho :)
>

[Zach Cox]

That may just be the new Iowa Scala Enthusiasts logo!

[Zach Cox]

Are you guys still using sbt-akka-bivy for deployments? Have you
tried assembly-sbt yet?

On Jan 26, 12:03 pm, Ben Metz <ben.m...@t8webware.com> wrote:
> Thx.  Really enjoyed your Lift prez as well... I might have caught the Lift
> bug.
>
> We are currently "deploying fat jars" :)  So no container.  Wade put this
> exact question to Coda Hale (Yammer) and Alex Payne(BankSimple/Twitter)
> about deploying Scala when we were at OSCON last year.  They both said just
> "deploy fat jars, and restart processes".

> We've been usinghttps://github.com/bwmcadams/sbt-akka-bivywhich makes it

> pretty easy to deploy akka apps.

> *
> *
> *However, *this projecthttps://github.com/codahale/assembly-sbtjust hit my

[Ben Metz]

Still using bivy.  assembly-sbt looks real nice, haven't tried it yet.

[Zach Cox]

Started using assembly-sbt tonight, works great. Produces one giant
jar and auto-creates manifest with main class.

Will still need upstart scripts to run as daemon though...