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radar/2018-03-01/akka-streams.md

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+---
+title:      "Akka Streams"
+ring:       assess
+quadrant:   languages-and-frameworks
+
+---
+
+In our backend services, we frequently encounter the task to transform data
+coming from and uploading to external sources and services.
+
+Building more complex data transformation processes with Akka Actors has proven
+very difficult for us in the past.
+
+Seeing this data as a stream of elements could allow handling them piece by
+piece and only keeping as much of the data in-process as can currently be
+handled.
+
+[Akka Streams](http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/stream/index.html) is
+a [Reactive Streams](http://www.reactive-streams.org/) implementation that
+provides a very end-user friendly API for setting up streams for data
+processing that are bounded in resource usage and efficient.  It uses the Akka
+Actor Framework to execute these streams in an asynchronous and parallel
+fashion exploiting today's multi-core architectures without having the user to
+interact with Actors directly. It handles things such as message resending in
+failure cases and preventing message overflow. It is also interoperable with
+other Reactive Streams implementations.
+
+Our first trials with Akka Streams were promising but we haven't yet implemented
+complex services with it.
+
+We will continue looking into it together with the
+[Alpakka](/languages-and-frameworks/alpakka.html) Connectors for integration
+work.