In this Lightbend Podcast, we sit down with Kitawa Wemo (Kiki), co-founder of Mama Ventures, a women-led growth accelerator company based in Nairobi, Kenya. We discuss the IT sector in Kenya and how industrial trends, Artificial Intelligence, and culture play a role in the technology start up space there. You can find out more about Kiki and Mama Ventures at http://www.mamaglobal.co.ke/

In this Lightbend podcast, Dean Wampler, VP of Fast Data Engineering, and Craig Blitz, Senior Product Director, discuss the Why, What, and How of Lightbend Pipelines, the newest module in Lightbend Platform.

In this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with Wade Waldron, Microservices Practice Lead at Lightbend, to discuss a question that we hear frequently from Lightbend customers and the OSS community: should we use Play Framework, Lagom Framework, or Akka HTTP for our next application? While all of these tools feature parts of the overall Akka Toolkit under the hood, they are in fact specialized for specific use cases. Wade describes which Lightbend technology is best suited for particular...

Lightbend CEO Mark Brewer discusses what joining the Eclipse Foundation as a founding member of the Jakarta EE Working Group means for bringing Reactive closer to the traditional Java enterprise landscape.

We were excited to connect with Middlegate’s Roshan Fernando (CEO) and Ed Stull (CTO) to learn more about their use of Akka as the backbone of their Grace platform, and how their new approach is taming key medical billing complexity issues that apply to every healthcare provider in the United States.

In this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with Marina Sigaeva, who recently presented a talk called “SBT: Baby Steps”, and Dale Wijnand of Lightbend to get the latest on sbt, discuss some of the history of this fascinating project, and see where things are heading in the future.

In this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with Renato Calvalcanti, Senior Engineer on the Lagom team and founder of the Belgium Scala User Group, who tells us about the latest release of Lagom 1.4, some history of Lagom since the 1.0 launch, as well as some ideas the team is working on for future releases.

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for Operations teams, Michael Nash and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss the value of resilient production tooling, and the benefits of one-stop shop support for various technologies integrated with Fast Data Platform. This conversation focuses on: • Why is it difficult to maintain always-on, dynamic workloads without resilient tooling, as well as managing multiple support contracts with various vendors? • What new challenges (and risks) are...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for Operations teams, Alan Ngai and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss the implications of monitoring and troubleshooting distributed, streaming Fast Data applications. This conversation focuses on: •Why can’t existing application monitoring tools designed for monoliths easily trace and gather metrics from distributed Fast Data applications? • What are the main challenges and considerations for monitoring Fast Data applications? • How...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for software developers, Sean Walsh and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss developer tooling for deploying and tuning high-performance Fast Data applications. This conversation focuses on: • Why is it important to understand the differences between the monolithic systems we used to build and deploy compared to streaming, Fast Data systems? • What changes in the traditional developer role impact building, and also deploying, these applications...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for software developers, Kikia Carter and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss the challenges that development teams are experiencing in this new era of Fast Data applications. This conversation focuses on: • Why does the nature of distributed, Fast Data applications make it difficult for developers to get started with new projects? • What are some of this biggest challenges development teams have described to Lightbend with building these types...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for software architects, Duncan DeVore and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss why it’s important to design a Fast Data system architecture based around resilience, scalability, and how this affects future deployment strategies. This conversation focuses on: • Why does architecting for resilience–the ability to rapidly self-heal rather than trying to avoid failures–enable your systems to scale in a much safer way? • What architectural design...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for software architects, Dean Wampler, PhD., and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss what’s going on in the rapidly evolving world of streaming engines. This conversation focuses on: • Why is the streaming and Fast Data ecosystem especially challenging to embrace? • Which best-of-breed streaming engines has Lightbend learned and analyzed deeply for inclusion in Fast Data Platform? • How Lightbend’s technical and domain expertise provides...

In this Lightbend Fast Data Platform interview for business leaders, Craig Blitz and Oliver White of Lightbend discuss the emergence of Fast Data as a competitive differentiator, and how this rapidly evolving ecosystem affects software design, development, and deployment. This conversation focuses on: • Why should we care about streaming architectures and Fast Data applications? • What do architects, developers and operations teams need to know about designing, building, and running these...

In this audio version of our recent videocast (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TigkNrCVqkY), three Lightbenders sit down to discuss Lightbend's newest training course: Reactive Architecture - Professional, a crash course in thinking differently, guided by experienced Lightbend expert who provides codified lessons learned, best practices, reference architectures, design patterns and analysis techniques when working with Reactive architectures.

In this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with special guest Jan Machacek, CTO of Cake Solutions, conference speaker, and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book, “Reactive Systems Architecture: Designing And Implementing An Entire Distributed System.” Jan tells us a bit about his book, which focuses on technologies and initiatives like Akka, Scala, Reactive Streams (coming to JDK 9), as well as some of his opinions on why Reactive is the best way for enterprises to keep up with changing business...

About six months ago, I started to see some really great blog posts come from a person named Colin Breck, who I’ve since had the pleasure of getting to know better. Colin is an experienced Akka developer who recently spoke at QCon London about using Quality Views to combat technical debt, and followed up with a podcast with InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/tesla-colin-breck Colin has spent a lot of time writing on http://blog.colinbreck.com to help developers understand the different...

With major enterprises such as LinkedIn, Verizon, Samsung, Weight Watchers and Norwegian Cruise Lines using Play Framework in production, we felt it would be interesting to invite Will back to our podcast program so that he could describe, at a deep technical level, what exactly makes Play Framework one of the fastest JVM web frameworks on the market.

Recently, we announced the EOL for Activator, and described a new direction for getting started with Lightbend Tech Hub. Including a Rapid Project Starter and a growing list of technical guides, this new, online experience makes it simpler for developers to understand what is possible with our Reactive Platform technologies Akka, Lagom, Play, Scala and Lightbend Enterprise Suite. In this podcast, we sit down with Eugene Yokota, Tech Lead for Lightbend’s Tooling Team, to discuss the new Tech...

Play 2.6 is coming soon, and introduces some very interesting new features, such as Akka HTTP with HTTP/2 becoming the default server, that ramp up Play's performance and security even further. In this short podcast with Will Sargent, presenter, trainer, consultant and senior engineer on the Play team at Lightbend, we go over what’s coming in Play 2.6, which features you can already test out now, and conclude with some background on just what makes Play Framework so fast compared to other JVM...

On this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with Patrik Nordwall, Akka Tech Lead at Lightbend, who talks about the upcoming release of Akka 2.5, as well as a bit about Akka Streams, Akka HTTP, Alpakka, and Akka’s commercial modules provided in Lightbend Reactive Platform.

CEO Mark Brewer discuss Lightbend's acquisition of SaaS Monitoring firm, OpsClarity, the company's second acquisition in 9 months, and how OpsClarity adds key capabilities to Reactive Platform for monitoring Streaming Data’s most popular open source frameworks such as Akka, Cassandra, Flink, Kafka, Spark.

Adriaan Moors, Scala Tech Lead at Lightbend, Inc., shares his reflections on the last 10 years with Scala, and his recent article in Oracle's Java Magazine "Scala: Deeply Functional, Purely Object-Oriented" which details how Scala unifies object-oriented and functional programming in a mature, fun, practical and type safe language for the Java platform.

In this short interview with Jonas Bonér, CTO and Co-founder of Lightbend, and Viktor Klang, Deputy CTO of Lightbend, we demystify the confusion around the term "Reactive", drawing from their recent O'Reilly Radar article and subsequent expanded white paper. Go here for more: https://www.lightbend.com/blog/white-paper-understanding-reactive-programming-vs-reactive-systems