<p>What are the alternate offerings available to Akka Cluster ? Currently it seems that to implement distributed applications (meaning being able to maintain cluster information so as to able to distribute the workload across nodes for effective utilization of resources), Akka-Cluster is the only choice. I see there are alternates available for Akka like Erlang but not Akka-Cluster.</p>
<p>Anyone aware of what other technologies offers ways to distribute the workload over cluster nodes ?</p>

bindu
<p>On the JVM, I think you can roughly break down distributed computing into a few categories.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>If you want distributed state, something like Hazelcast (an in-memory grid) will work, but you're on your own for organizing tasks that operate with/on that data.</p>
</li>
<li><p>If you want distributed task execution, Flink and Spark can do that.  Coordinating state changes may be difficult, and you may have to contort input into their basic abstractions (RDDs and streams).</p>
</li>
<li><p>Pubsub on top of a replicated log (as in Kafka and Pulsar) is, like Akka, explicitly message-based (in practice, anything in distributed computing becomes message-based: at some point you have packets going over the wire), but you can very quickly build up a tangle of services and topics.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Akka is to my knowledge the only (or at least most mature) option that covers state distribution and task distribution, and it does so a bit less statically (in terms of scalability: I'm specifically thinking about how Kafka's ordering guarantees become less guaranteed as you scale).  A tangle of actors interacting is also (especially if using the typed APIs in preference to the classic APIs) probably easier to trace in an IDE than a tangle of services interacting via Kafka.</p>
<p>To inject a little bit of opinion, while Kafka is, in my experience using it as a dumb pipe, rock solid, I'm not a fan of a tendency I've observed in its primary vendor to overpromise in the realm of distributed computing, while I've found Akka's primary vendor to be pretty up-front about there being no silver bullet.</p>
