Unit-3

Akka.NET Bootcamp - Unit 3: Advanced Akka.NET

In Unit 1, we learned some of the fundamentals of Akka.NET and the actor model.

In Unit 2 we learned some of the more sophisticated concepts behind Akka.NET, such as pattern matching, basic Akka.NET configuration, scheduled messages, and more!

In Unit 3, we're going to learn how to leverage the Task Parallelism Library (TPL) and Akka.NET routers to scale out actor systems for massive performance boosts via parallelism.

Concepts you'll learn

Over the course of Unit 3, you're going to build a sophisticated GitHub scraper that can simultaneously retrieve data from multiple GitHub repos at once.

This system will also be able to fetch information about the GitHubbers who have participated in those repos (e.g. starred or forked). By the end, we'll have a nicely scalable system for retrieving data from the GitHub API, capable of coordinating a huge amount of data retrieval in parallel (up to the allowed rate limit of the API, of course)!

In Unit 3 you will learn:

1. How to use Group routers to divide work among your actors
2. How to use Pool routers to automatically create and manage pools of actors
3. How to use HOCON to configure your routers
4. How to use Ask to wait inline for actors to respond to your messages
5. How to perform work asynchronously inside your actors using PipeTo
6. Stateful vs Stateless Routing

Teaming up with Octokit, the official GitHub SDK for .NET

In this lesson we'll also be introducing you to Octokit, the official GitHub SDK for .NET (and other languages!)

If you have any questions about Octokit or want to learn more about it, make sure you check out Octokit.NET on GitHub!

Table of Contents

1. Lesson 1: Using Group routers to divide work among your actors
2. Lesson 2: Using Pool routers to automatically create and manage pools of actors
3. Lesson 3: How to use HOCON to configure your routers
4. Lesson 4: How to perform work asynchronously inside your actors using PipeTo
5. Lesson 5: How to prevent deadlocks with ReceiveTimeout

Things you'll need

You will need to make a GitHub OAuth access token for the API.

This will be a throwaway token in your account only used for this app. Follow the instructions here and write down your OAuth token.

Get Started

To get started, go to the /DoThis/ folder and open GithubActors.sln.

And then go to Lesson 1.