Local Affinity
Virtual Actors with locality to Kafka consumer
Local Affinity placement enables us to place virtual actors in the locality to some other resource. In this example, we place the virtual actors close to an Apache Kafka consumer. The actors on the same cluster member, will only be actors that consume messages from the partitions of this specific Kafka consumer.
Scale up or down
In case there is a scale up or down scenario, some of these actors will now be on the original node where they first spawned. This means that the communication from the Proto.Kafka forwarder will have to do remote communication with those actors.
Here is where gradual migration comes into play. The actors will check if the sender of a message is on a remote node, and if so, ad a random, user-defined interval, start to shut themselves down and eventually respawn on the correct node.
Migrating local actors
Once all actors have migrated, we are now back at having fully local affinity from Kafka partitions to actors consuming the messages from those partitions.
Simulating millions of topics
We now get the best of both worlds, robust fault-tolerant systems, with the performance of in-process communication.
Conceptually, we can view this setup as refined topics, where you have a single topic per named actor. This means that we can have millions of topics with actor concurrency guarantees for consumption.
