We have passed through the valley of the shadow of Large Language Models version of AI. Now we have moved a level to the gorge of Agentic AI. I’ve written about three posts I believe on that subject. Here is another company unveiling Agentic AI solutions.
Akka, the leader in helping enterprises deliver distributed systems that are elastic, agile, and resilient, announced new deployment options for its Akka solution, as well as new solutions to tackle the issues with deploying large-scale agentic AI systems for mission-critical applications. Already the standard for building resilient and elastic distributed systems with industry leaders like Capital One, John Deere, Tubi, Walmart, Swiggy, and many others, Akka now also gives enterprises unprecedented freedom to deploy Akka-based applications on the infrastructure of their choice. For the first time, developers now have two new options that enable them to leverage Akka to build distributed systems at scale and self-host their application or deploy their application across multiple regions automatically.
“Agentic AI has become a priority with enterprises everywhere as a new model that has the potential to replace enterprise software as we understand it today,” said Tyler Jewell, Akka’s CEO. “With today’s announcement, we’re making it easy for enterprises to build their distributed systems, including agentic AI deployments, without having to commit to Akka’s Platform. Now, enterprise teams can quickly build scalable systems locally and run them on any infrastructure they want.”
The agentic shift requires a fundamental architectural change from transaction-centered to conversation-centered systems. Traditional SaaS applications are built on stateless business logic executing CRUD operations against relational databases. In contrast, agentic services maintain state within the service itself and store each event to track how the service reached its current state.
As a result, developer teams experience very unpredictable behavior, limited planning and memory impacting agent effectiveness, hard failures at scale, opaque decision-making with zero transparency, and, perhaps most importantly, significant cost and latency concerns.
Today, Akka has introduced two new deployment capabilities:
- Self-managed Akka nodes – You can now run clusters of services that were built with Akka SDK on any cloud infrastructure. The new version of the Akka SDK includes a self-managed build option that will create services that can be executed stand-alone. Your services are binaries packaged in Docker images that can be deployed in any container PaaS, bare metal hardware, VMs, edge nodes, or Kubernetes with any Akka infrastructure or Platform dependencies. Your nodes have Akka clustering built from within.
- Self-hosted Akka Platform regions – Teams can now run your own Akka Platform region without any dependency on Akka.io control planes. Services built with the Akka SDK have always been deployable onto Akka Platform, with Akka providing managed services through the company’s Akka Serverless and Akka BYOC offerings. Akka Platform provides fully automated operations, alleviating admins from more than 30 maintenance, security, and observability duties. Both Serverless and BYOC federated multiple regions together by using an Akka control plane hosted at Akka.io.
In contrast, self-hosted regions are Akka Platform regions with no Akka control plane dependency, which teams will install, maintain, and manage on their own. Self-hosted regions can be installed in any data center with orchestration, proxy, and infrastructure dependencies specified by Akka. Since Akka Platform is updated many times each week, the installation of self-hosted regions is executed in cooperation with Akka’s SRE team to ensure stability and consistency of a customer environment.
Akka, formerly known as Lightbend, is relied upon by industry titans and disruptors to build and run distributed applications that are elastic, agile, and guaranteed resilient.
