Lightbend, inventors of the Akka distributed application platform, today announced the latest version of Akka, version 24.05. This latest version delivers new functionality across multiple categories, including performance, security, compliance, ecosystem support, and additional edge computing capabilities. New features include support for Zero Trust compliance support, database sharding, Java 21 support, and Rust support.

“As security, performance, and ecosystem support demand continue to evolve, Akka is innovating to meet these new market realities,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend co-founder and CTO. “That includes a continued focus on security and compliance, particularly in the wake of open source vulnerabilities such as the recent issue associated with xz utils. More and more of our enterprise customers are prioritizing this as threats continue to emerge and new regulations are implemented globally.”

Akka provides a singular programming model that eliminates the high latency, large footprint, and complexity barriers current Cloud and Edge architectures pose for development teams wanting to build highly distributed multi-cloud applications. As a result, businesses can harness, distribute, and fully utilize their vast amounts of intelligent data to improve their operations, regardless of where that data is generated. For version 24.05, there are four primary categories of enhancements:

• Security and Compliance via Zero Trust Certification - As new regulations and security issues with Open Source Software (OSS) continue to proliferate, Lightbend ensures its platform meets industry security and regulatory compliance standards. Specifically, Lightbend and Akka have been audited and attested to be SOC 2 and NIST SF 800 compliant. In addition, Lightbend continues to invest in Akka security by offering guidelines on how users can attest to their Akka distributed applications being ZeroTrust compliant.
• Performance - Database Sharding enables near-infinite horizontal scale out of database persistence, eliminating the cost of using a high-performance, centralized database. This reduces the overall cost for a mission-critical system but streamlines the architecture and reduces the operational burden on IT.
• Enhanced Edge Computing Capabilities - Capability with the Rust programming language, which is extremely prolific for Edge use cases, enables Akka services to be deployed on devices with minimal footprint and compute requirements.
• Support for Java 21 - Akka 24.05 is now certified to support Java 21, which vastly improves conciseness and lowers the risk of mistakes for developers.

Akka 24.05 and its new capabilities are available today. Interested parties can join us for a live walkthrough of Akka 24.05 to learn more.

About LightbendLightbend (@Lightbend) is used by many of the world’s largest brands as the foundation for their multi-cloud, mission-critical applications. Through Akka, the industry’s most powerful distributed application platform, Lightbend provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems optimized to run on cloud native infrastructure. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.

Editorial ContactKimberly Falk VP of Marketing, Lightbend +1 415 515 0686kimberly.falk@lightbend.com

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