Reactive Summit 2017

Service Discovery is an important aspect of microservices, particularly when using containers on elastic infrastructure. Most popular approaches for service discovery require a stand-alone fault tolerant cluster like Consul, Zookeeper or etcd. If you are already using Akka as a clustering platform for your services, there is an interesting alternative available for Service Discovery. CRDTs, or Conflict-free Replicated Data Types are a relatively new primitive in distributed systems. CRDTs allows concurrent updates without coordination and has provisions for tuning consistency levels. 'Distributed Data' extension natively supports CRDTs on top of Akka-Cluster. We used CRDTs in Akka to build the service registration and discovery mechanism for TMT's (Thirty Meter Telescope) software platform. TMT will be world's largest optical telescope once operational. The ongoing software work is open source and available on Github. We would like to share the details of our implementation and also compare it existing approaches.