Pages on Manuel Bernhardt

Akka Cluster on Raspberry PI

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 16:00:09 +0100

Akka is a toolkit for building massively scalable applications. At the same time, it is lightweight enough to be deployed on Raspberry PI computers. I’m fascinated with these machines since I first saw one in real life at Devoxx Antwerp in 2010, own quite a few of them (some of which are hooked up to various appliances in my home) and use them in order to demonstrate Akka Cluster to clients or at training courses.

Akka anti-patterns overview

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 09:52:44 +0100

This is an overview of Akka anti-pattern articles. You can think of these anti-patterns as the opposite of Akka best practices – that is, things you should not be doing when using Akka.

Here is also a talk about 8 very frequent anti-patterns out there:

Basics

Performance

Network / Cluster

Using remoting
Trusting the network
Always using the defaults (to be written)
Using cluster without / with the wrong split-brain resolver (to be written)

Architecture / Design

Not defining a protocol (to be written)
Naming your application components after akka concepts
Too many actor systems
Blindly ignoring dead letters (to be written)

Articles

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:40:23 +0200

This is an overview of some of what I’ve written over the years.

Featured

SRE / DevOps

On Azure

Rust

Tour of Temporal

Tour of Akka Typed

Tour of Akka Cluster

Akka anti-patterns

Basics

Performance

Network / Cluster

Using remoting
Trusting the network
Always using the defaults (to be written)
Using cluster without / with the wrong split-brain resolver (to be written)

Architecture / Design

Not defining a protocol (to be written)
Naming your application components after akka concepts
Too many actor systems
Blindly ignoring dead letters (to be written)

Akka

Scala

Play Framework

Reactive Database Access

Misc

What I'm doing now

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:20:31 +0100

This is a now page that tells you what I am focusing on at this point in my life.

These days, I am:

taking care of SRE and security (DevSecOps) for a client in Vienna, with increased focus on the cloud security aspect
finishing to renovate the new place I moved into

This page was last updated on 21st of May 2026

About

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 21:12:15 +0100

I’m a polyglot software engineer and trainer working as an independent consultant.

My consulting work consists in helping my clients:

engineer, deploy and operate highly available and fault-tolerant systems
get existing systems to meet predictable performance requirements in the face of increasing load

I have significant experience in engineering and operating distributed systems at all levels of the stack, from high-level architecture down to debugging issues at the kernel or network level. Next to working on client projects I have also explored the topics of cluster membership and distributed consensus, trying to keep up to date with the latest research in this field and sometimes pushing the limit myself.

Reactive Web Applications

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 15:38:10 +0000

Reactive Web Applications

I decided to put the know-how I’ve collected over the years to good use by writing a book that will help others get started with reactive web applications. “Reactive Web Applications” will introduce you to a few concepts that will provide a basis for working with reactive architecture and making the most out of it.

The book is the result of several years of experience designing, building and working with teams to build high-performant, fault-resilient web applications using the Play Framework, Akka and Scala. In a way, this is the book I wish I had had when I first started working with this stack.