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Lightbend’s Akka Serverless Platform-as-a-Service Generally Available for Stateful Serverless App Development

SAN FRANCISCO, November 18, 2021 – Lightbend, a company providing cloud-native microservice frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, today announced the general availability of Akka Serverless, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that sets a new standard for cloud native application development. Akka Serverless is based on an advanced new architecture that can remove the historical limitations that prevented the development of general-purpose, business-critical applications using the serverless model. Akka Serverless enables the creation of cloud native apps using any programming language and reduces the need for databases in deploying business-critical applications. Interested parties can get started with Akka Serverless today.

“For the last few months, Akka Serverless’ beta has definitively proven its value to our participating customers. We’re thrilled to bring this new approach to the rest of the world, starting today,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “This superior model for cloud native development can now enable many more complex applications to be built using the serverless model, such as IoT platforms, real-time financial services, modern eCommerce systems, streaming media, internet-based gaming, factory automation, telemedicine, and more.”

The launch of Akka Serverless highlights a renewed focus for Lightbend on supporting developer needs for building cloud native services and APIs. In addition to its general availability, Akka Serverless has added several new features per its customers’ feedback. Some of these include:

  • New State Models including Replicated Entities (CRDTs) - Akka Serverless comes to market with a rounded out set of state models— the “how” and “where” you store your application data— to give the utmost flexibility to developers while fulfilling the vision of zero ops required for stateful APIs and Services.
  • Security Upgrades - Building upon end-to-end encryption (on data in motion and at rest) and other security measures already in place, Akka Serverless now supports secure authentication and authorization of API/Service endpoints through the use of JSON web tokens (JWT).
  • EU POP (dev mode) - With this addition, developers across the EU are able to take advantage of Akka Serverless’ benefits
  • Production SDK Support of Scala and Typescript and feature upgraded Community Support for Python - The addition of these SDKs expands the number of developers capable of using this new approach

“Organizations are increasingly seeking out solutions that easily enable the development of cloud native applications,” says James Ward, developer advocate at Google Cloud. “We’re pleased to have Akka Serverless running on Google Cloud to provide customers with secure and flexible solutions for building out their cloud native services.”

About Akka Serverless

Akka Serverless gives every business the backend infrastructure that powers the world’s most complex and demanding applications, but without the complexity or personnel requirements needed for a traditional Akka Platform deployment. Akka Serverless is delivered via a model similar to existing serverless offerings, but it is the first (and currently only) service to provide the ease of use inherent in the current serverless model combined with the capability to build business-critical stateful applications.

Akka Serverless delivers these capabilities through a declarative API-first polyglot programming model allowing the developer to focus solely on the business logic. One major reason why serverless offerings are not currently used to build high-performance business applications is the challenge of managing distributed state at scale—something that Akka Serverless has solved. Pioneering a new distributed state model, Akka Serverless delivers increased velocity for the business in an extremely cost-effective manner with existing developers and serverless cloud infrastructure.

Akka Serverless is also the first solution to eliminate the need for databases for business-critical applications. Just as serverless offerings allow businesses to not worry about servers, Akka Serverless enables businesses to not concern themselves with database administration, maintenance, or even APIs.

Serverless has a simple, API-driven programming model that makes it easy for developers to define the data that they need and manages that data behind the scenes so that it is available automatically at runtime. Akka Serverless does not have the limitations associated with Function-as-a-Service serverless approaches related to state handling and performance, yet these are not exposed as developer-level concerns.

Akka Serverless supports a broad set of programming languages and allows developers to focus purely on writing the business logic for their application while using the toolchains with which they are most familiar. Akka Serverless leverages Akka’s proven reactive architecture for building stateful, high-performance, business-critical systems, without the developer needing to understand the complexities of Akka itself or distributed systems architecture in general.

About Lightbend

Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications and setting the standard for cloud native architectures. Lightbend provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure. Lightbend powers the world’s most innovative companies. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.

Media Contact:

Nichols Communications for Lightbend
Jay Nichols
+1 408 772 1551
jay@nicholscomm.com