Application Design with Actors Made Easy: Think Locally, Act Globally

One of the major sources of actors' power is their ability to atomize complex operations into smaller, thread-safe, discrete units of code.

In this video we walk through how we modeled a fully functional Blazor applications with actors using a "local first" design methodology, which allowed us to address local domain and entity design + plumbing + fault tolerance issues correctly first. Akka.NET's powerful networking and persistence capabilities allowed us to them seamlessly move this functionality into a clustered environment with very few code changes. See how it can be done and watch the video.

Akka.NET: https://getakka.net/
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DrawTogether.NET Source Code: https://github.com/petabridge/DrawTog...

Building Real-Time Web Applications with Blazor and Akka.NET:    • Building Real-Time Web Applications w...  
Distributing State Reliably with Cluster.Sharding:    • Distributing State Reliably with Akka...  
How Akka.NET Actors Process Messages:    • How Akka.NET Actors Process Messages  
Introduction to Akka.Streams:    • Introduction to Akka.NET Streams  
Akka.NET Application Design: Don't Create Bespoke Frameworks; Use Repeatable Patterns:    • Akka.NET Application Design: Don't Cr...  
Message and State Versioning in .NET (Using Akka.NET):    • Message and State Versioning in .NET ...  

(00:00) Introduction
(01:01) Use Case: DrawTogether.NET
(02:51) Sources of Complexity
(03:33) What Developers Do Wrong
(04:21) Local Server Design
(06:04) Defining Client-Side State
(07:49) Server-Side State
(09:16) Defining Messages and Events
(11:43) Pushing Live Events to Blazor
(14:17) Multi-Tenant Session Handling with Local Actors
(18:26) Supporting Multiple Entities with Local Actors
(21:27) Adding Local Fault Tolerance
(22:17) Making State Recoverable and Re-entrant with Akka.Persistence
(23:48) Using DeathWatch to Detect Dead Actors
(26:02) Detecting Blazor Client Terminations with CancellationTokens
(28:06) Recap of Local Workflows
(30:20) Suprisingly Easy: Moving to Multi-Server
(32:05) Serialization
(32:52) Adding Akka.Cluster
(33:28) Sharding the DrawingSessionActors
(34:33) Conclusion