A case study of how Scala and Akka helped a team of software developers without a whole lot of distributed system programming experience build a fairly sophisticated, production quality distributed system with a custom multipaxos implementation at its core. The name of the system is Sirius, and we're using it to power the next generation of our API layer at Comcast's Interactive Media division. The talk will focus on how we use'd Akka and Scala to build the core of the system. Our basic approach was to read up on all the Paxos literature we could find. We then took the psuedocode in "Paxos Made Moderately Complex" and translated it wholesale into straightforward Scala using functions and tuples. Then we slowly massaged that code into something cleaner using case classes before moving it into Akka actors. Finally, we went through that naive implementation to optimize our usage of memory and network resources to finish the core Paxos implementation. We've had this running in production for about half a year now with only minor issues. Given that we had very limited experience with distributed systems, this a major miracle that we couldn't have pulled off without Akka.

No outline is available