Intermediate

Akka/Apache Pekko Essentials with Scala

Become an Akka/Pekko developer with our essentials course. Master the fundamentals of Akka/Pekko with Scala and distributed JVM applications through clear lessons, practical exercises, and a smooth learning curve. Ideal for those with some programming experience, this course will quickly equip you with essential skills to effectively tackle real-world distributed challenges.

Duration: 10h of 4K content
Lessons: 29 lessons

By Daniel Ciocîrlan

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Skills You'll Learn

Write massively parallel and distributed applications with actors
Add resilience and fault tolerance without complexity
Test concurrent applications that are notoriously hard to test
Work with actors instead of threads and locks
Manage actors in hierarchies with system guardians
Change actor behavior dynamically
Configure Akka/Pekko applications in five different ways
Test with TestKit, TestProbes and timed assertions
Intercept actor logs to verify correct behavior
Manage actor lifecycle and implement supervisor strategies
Use the Backoff Supervisor pattern for external resource recovery
Schedule messages and manage timeouts
Distribute tasks with Routers
Configure custom dispatchers and mailboxes
Stash messages for later processing
Use the ask pattern for request-response interactions
Use the pipe pattern for external service integration

Goal

Think concurrency differently.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard about Akka, Pekko or the actor model. It’s one of the most powerful abstractions of concurrent programming we’ve had, even though it’s not new. No more creating threads, no more locking, double-locking, deadlocks and concurrency problems. With actors, you can write heavily concurrent and distributed systems quickly, without the usual headaches. As such, massively parallel and distributed backends all over the place are powered by Akka.

This course is for the Scala developer willing to tap into the actor model and a new way of thinking parallel and distributed code.

The course fully supports Akka (from Lightbend) as well as Pekko, the open-source version of Akka.

What Our Students Say

Trusted by 100,000+ students worldwide

My team is expanding the use of Akka in our products so I needed a quick introduction on this topic. I have tried a couple of courses but the introduction to Akka was always too abrupt, too hard to comprehend. I blamed Akka for this as being too hard to explain. This was until I was exposed to the Rock The JVM courses which were an absolute delight when it comes to presenting such complex topics in such an easy to understand way. And Daniel has not stopped at Akka but has added to his portfolio amazing courses on Scala and Spark too. It seems like he is quite enjoying taking such challenges like complex technologies and making them so simple for everyone. I have instantly recommended Daniel’s work to my team, which helped them immensely with taking their skills to a new level, and I do recommend these courses to anyone who wants to have the fastest ramp-up in these tough but popular technologies.

Mihai Fecioru
Adobe · California
From Scala, to Akka, to Spark, Daniel delivers exceptional material in each and every one of these technologies. I’ve been using them for a long time and there is always something new I will discover from him. The level of detail he gets into as well as the way he delivers material is mindblowing. I personally find his latest course Spark Optimization pure gold and one of a kind. I’ve been using Spark for a year now and I haven’t even thought how much you can leverage query plans to make such optimizations. I can’t stop thinking every time, how he manages to go so deep - because using a technology is one thing, but knowing its internals so well and how everything works behind the scenes is another story when it comes to distributed systems. Long story short Daniel is definitely the best instructor I’ve come across and each one of his courses is the best resource you can find online. Kudos for all your work and knowledge sharing.

Giannis Polyzos
Ververica · Greece
Daniel’s courses on Scala and Big Data are the best in class. I’ve been in touch with Daniel’s teaching and courses since early 2018. The first course that I took from him was Scala & Functional Programming; I was skeptical about it because over the internet there are many courses you can find, but few really worthy. I remember the very first day when Daniel started to speak and shared his examples - I started to love Scala, and then more as we went on. I am with Scala for the last 5 years now, but never ever has anyone explained to me or gave me comparable resources to Rock the JVM. Daniel gave me a shift in life and helped me crack top tech company interviews. His courses on big data are a must for any aspiring big data developer or data enthusiast. I highly recommend Daniel as an educator both online and on campus.

Anirban Goswami
Apple · California

What's Included

6 sections

29 lessons

8h 47m total length

Intro

Welcome!

07:53 Preview

Scala Recap

31:49 Preview

Thread Model Limitations

17:58 Preview

Actors

Introduction to the Actor Model

03:30 Preview

Practical Intro to Actors

16:30 Preview

19:51 Preview

05:20 Preview

25:16 Preview

32:59 Preview

Child Actors: Exercise

29:56 Preview

Stopping Actors

18:31 Preview

Watching Actors

13:21 Preview

Antipattern: Breaking Actor Encapsulation

22:08 Preview

Actor Supervision

26:04 Preview

Testing

20:53 Preview

20:25 Preview

16:04 Preview

26:10 Preview

17:02 Preview

Akka Infrastructure

Configuration

17:59 Preview

Schedulers

22:17 Preview

Timers

10:27 Preview

Routers

23:58 Preview

Dispatchers

24:20 Preview

Mailboxes

15:07 Preview

Advanced Patterns

Ask

17:33 Preview

Pipe

11:20 Preview

Stash

12:29 Preview

You Rock!

Congratulations!

00:45 Preview

Meet Rock the JVM

Daniel Ciocîrlan

Founder, Rock the JVM

I'm a software engineer and the founder of Rock the JVM.

I started Rock the JVM out of love for Scala and the technologies it powers. They are amazing tools, and I want to share as much of my experience with them as I can.

I've taught Java, Scala, Kotlin and related technologies such as Cats, ZIO and Spark to 100,000+ students at various levels. I've held live training sessions for companies including Adobe and Apple, taught university students who now work at Google and Facebook, run Hour of Code for 7-year-olds, and taught more than 50,000+ kids to code.

I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science and I wrote my Bachelor and Master thesis on Quantum Computation. Before learning programming, I won medals at international Physics competitions.

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