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scalaakkaakka-remote-actor

Akka events between local and remote actors

Using the event bus mechanism between actors in the same ActorSystem is straight-forward, but I was wondering if there was a sanctioned method for doing so between:

  • Actors in different ActorSystems in the same JVM
  • Actors in different JVMs (via remoting)

Assuming that I know the paths to the actors is fine, but if there was a commonly used mechanism to discover those kinds of things as well, I'd love to hear about it.

Solution

  • I think in this case you need to look for distributed publish-subscribe on a cluster, supposing you want to subscribe actors to events, without awareness of the location of the actors. This link may prove useful.

    This is a note from the official Akka documentation:

    The event stream is a local facility, meaning that it will not distribute events to other nodes in a clustered environment (unless you subscribe a Remote Actor to the stream explicitly). If you need to broadcast events in an Akka cluster, without knowing your recipients explicitly (i.e. obtaining their ActorRefs), you may want to look into: Distributed Publish Subscribe in Cluster.