Actors are Distributed (Part 1)

In this lecture we deploy Actors on a cluster of nodes, noticing that this does not change the programming model at all: Actors come fully prepared for remote interaction. This is enabled by hiding all their functionality behind a handle that only allows messages to be sent, the ActorRef in Akka. We cover:

• the impact of remote communication compared to local messaging
• ActorPath and its relationship with ActorRef
• the definition of what constitutes an Akka Cluster
• how to start up a cluster and run Actors on it
• routing messages to Actors elsewhere on the cluster
• deploying Actors from one node to the other

Cluster usage is demonstrated on the example of the link checker developed during an earlier lecture.