5 - Jonas Bonér on Akka, Distributed Systems, Open-Source Sustainability and the Backbone of Agentic AI
May 27, 2025 • 2h 2m
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About this episode
Jonas Bonér is the founder and CTO of Akka Inc. and creator of the Akka project and the Reactive Manifesto. He's also a Java Champion.
You can find Jonas at http://jonasboner.com
0:00 Intro 2:30 Akka's origin story: 2009 consultancy to open source 9:30 The actor model: message passing, isolation, and fault tolerance 24:10 Supervision hierarchies and location transparency 37:00 Akka modules: Streams, Clustering, and Sharding 51:00 CRDTs, Alpakka, gRPC, and brokerless PubSub 1:03:00 Akka Edge: extending actors to Rust and devices 1:09:30 The Akka platform SDK: from months to days 1:20:30 Event sourcing and CQRS in the Akka SDK 1:27:00 Serverless, bring-your-own-cloud, and self-hosted deploys 1:38:00 BSL license change: survival over ideology 1:46:00 Open-source sustainability and the tragedy of the commons 1:53:00 Agentic AI and the actor model as its backbone 1:58:00 Distributed systems: what engineers still get wrong