Location Transparency The previous section describes how actor PIDs are used to enable location transparency. This special feature deserves some extra explanation, because the related term “transparent remoting” was used quite differently in the context of programming languages, platforms and technologies. Distributed by Default Everything in Proto.Actor is designed to work in a distributed setting: all interactions of actors use purely message passing and everything is asynchronous. This effort has been undertaken to ensure that all functions are available equally when running within a single actor system or on a cluster of hundreds of machines. Read more...

Messages One of the most fundamental concepts to the Actor model is the notion of “message-driven systems,” as defined by the Reactive Manifesto: A message is an item of data that is sent to a specific destination. An event is a signal emitted by a component upon reaching a given state. In a message-driven system addressable recipients await the arrival of messages and react to them, otherwise lying dormant. Read more...

Proto.Actor Bootcamp Get the sourcecode github.com/AsynkronIT/protoactor-bootcamp Welcome to Proto.Actor Bootcamp. It is a free course for self-study. This training course consists of nine main parts, during which you will learn how to create fully functional, real-world programs using Proto.Actor actors and many other components of the Proto.Actor Framework. We will start with the basics of actors and gradually approach more complex examples. This course is for self-study — you can do it at any pace you like. Read more...

Module 1: Introduction to Actor Model and Proto.Actor Concepts you will learn Welcome to the course on building parallel applications based on the actor model and the Proto.Actor platform. Creating parallel, distributed, and robust applications is a complicated task. However, using the actor model and the Proto.Actor platform significantly simplifies this task. With Proto. Actor, you no longer have to worry about manually managing threads and locking shared resources. Instead, you will use high-level abstractions such as Actors and Messages. Read more...

Proto.Actor Framework TL;DR: Just show me the code! Hello World Getting Started Getting Started With Grains / Virtual Actors (.NET) Getting Started With Grains / Virtual Actors (Go) Deploy to Kubernetes Introduction What is Proto.Actor? Why Proto.Actor Design Principles Features Concepts What is an Actor? What is a Message? Actor Communication Terminology, Concepts Supervision and Monitoring Fault Tolerance Actor lifecycle Location Transparency Message Delivery Reliability Message Patterns Actors vs Queues and Logs - Comparison and decision guide for messaging primitives Backpressure and Flow Control Consistency Models CAP Theorem Consensus and Leader Election Service Discovery Sharding and Data Partitioning Building Blocks Core Features Actor - What are actors? Read more...

Proto.Cluster [Homage to Proto.Actors Swedish roots, Swedish midsummer ring dance - Connected Cluster Actors] Example Source Code Working cluster examples are available on GitHub: .NET cluster example Go cluster example Virtual Actors, aka. Grains Proto.Cluster leverages the “Virtual Actor Model”, pioneered by Microsoft Orleans. Unlike the traditional Actor Model used in Erlang or Akka, where developers must manage actor lifecycles, placement, and failures, the virtual actor model focuses on ease of use and high availability, abstracting most complexity away from the developer. Read more...

Scheduling Messages In C#, we provide the SimpleScheduler implementation of the ISimpleSchedulerinterface. This allows you to do operations such as ScheduleTellOnce, ScheduleRequestOnce and ScheduleTellRepeatedly ISimpleScheduler scheduler = new SimpleScheduler(); var pid = context.Spawn(Actor.FromProducer(() => new ScheduleGreetActor())); scheduler .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 1")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(200), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 2")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(300), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 3")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(400), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 4")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(500), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 5")) .ScheduleRequestOnce(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), context.Self, pid, new Greet("Daniel")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), context.Self, new Hello()) . Read more...

Supervision This document outlines the concept behind supervision and what that means for your Proto.Actor actors at run-time. Example Source Code Practical implementations are available on GitHub: .NET Supervision example Go Supervision example What Supervision means Supervision describes a dependency relationship between actors: the supervisor delegates tasks to subordinates and therefore must respond to their failures. When a subordinate detects a failure (i.e. throws an exception), it suspends itself and all its subordinates and sends a message to its supervisor, signaling failure. Read more...

Terminology and Concepts In this chapter we attempt to establish a common terminology to define a solid ground for communicating about concurrent, distributed systems which Proto.Actor targets. Please note that, for many of these terms, there is no single agreed definition. We simply seek to give working definitions that will be used in the scope of the Proto.Actor documentation. Concurrency vs. Parallelism Concurrency and parallelism are related concepts, but there are small differences. Read more...

What is Proto.Actor? Proto.Actor is a Next generation Actor Model framework. Over the last few years, two competing approaches to actors have emerged. First are the classical Erlang/Classic Akka-style actors; later came the Microsoft Orleans-style “virtual actors” or “grains”. Each approach offers different benefits and drawbacks. Proto.Actor unifies both of these two ways of working under a common framework. Proto.Actor solves another major issue, none of the pre-existing actor model frameworks or languages can communicate between platforms. Read more...