Preface

Duncan and Sean had various Internet of Things (IoT) problems back in 2011 and realized that the typical application architectures weren’t going to work for them. They needed to look into other options, which led them to discovering Akka, as well as embracing concepts of domain-driven design, Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), and Event Sourcing. In embracing these concepts, they were able to concentrate on their challenging business problems and enjoyed an architecture that worked as well for 1,000 transactions a day as it did for 1 billion.

After enjoying some early successes, they quickly realized that reactive Akka applications would be the wave of the future and that scale and IoT would grow proportionately over time. Sean had already been in contact with Manning and had been working on book reviews for the company. With this relationship already in place, Duncan thought that he and Sean should write this book. Reactive architectures did become hot—so much so that Duncan and Sean became very busy and stayed that way. Sean founded Reactibility and quickly took on Weight Watchers’ digital transformation as chief architect of the effort. Duncan, realized his dream of joining Lightbend (then named Typesafe). Finding time to write was a challenge, and they were lucky that Brian joined them to get the book finished.