Akka, Akka Streams, and Akka HTTP are great libraries for building reactive systems. Results are highly performant & resilient systems with code that is clean and easy to maintain. Being libraries, developers enjoy great flexibility in using them in their applications. This flexibility comes with a cost if they are used at scale in the enterprise. Consistent and uniform use of libraries across many applications and engineering teams makes them more manageable when delivering business critical functionality in the enterprise.
Project squbs (rhymes with “cubes”) is an open source project that originated at ebay and PayPal to support large scale enterprise adoption of Akka. It powers several mission critical systems in production at both these companies. squbs provides a uniform pattern across applications with a well defined lifecycle for actors, http, and streams. It provides configuration, consistent monitoring, an administration console, testing conventions, a pluggable module system, and support libraries. It is important to know though that squbs provides the necessary integration hooks so your Akka Streams and Akka HTTP applications can be easily integrated into your own enterprise operational environment.
While squbs provides a server infrastructure, it does not define a framework. Developers are still programming to Akka, Akka Streams, and Akka HTTP directly but without the hurdle of getting an unknown application to live. Operations, monitoring thousands of revenue-generating applications 24x7, will still see a consistent view of the application with consistent deployments and consistent metrics.