/Akka.Persistence.Extras

Akka.NET Persistence extras and ideas

Primary LanguageC#Apache License 2.0Apache-2.0

Akka.Persistence.Extras

This package contains some additions to Akka.Persistence that many users commonly find to be useful.

You can read more about Akka.Persistence.Extras at: https://devops.petabridge.com/articles/msgdelivery/

You can install these tools via the Akka.Persistence.Extras NuGet Package

PS> Install-Package Akka.Persistence.Extras

AtLeastOnceDeliveryActorV2

The AtLeastOnceDeliveryActor base type in its current form is a total non-pleasure to use in production, for the following reasons:

  1. Messages that are queued for reliable delivery via the Deliver method aren't automatically persisted, therefore the actor can't fulfill its delviery guarantees unless the user manually writes code for saving the AtLeastOnceDeliverySnapshot objects;
  2. It's not clear when or how often an AtLeastOnceDeliverySnapshot should be saved - there are no clear guidelines for this and actors with a large number of outstanding messages for delivery can pay massive performance penalties, having to save their entire delivery state at once all the time for each incremental change;
  3. Saving the AtLeastOnceDeliverySnapshot object requires either continuously rewriting one snapshot object without updating its sequence number (bad practice) or some awkard combination with using the normal Persist methods BUT without those Persist methods doing anything that can interfere with the contiguous state of the delivery snapshot - TL;DR; Persist can only really be used for things not directly related to delivery state;
  4. In general, this class requires the end user to memorize a significant amount of boilerplate when it comes to actually using it correctly.

The goal of this project is to rewrite the AtLeastOnceDeliveryActor to do the following:

  1. Automatically persist all messages queued for delivery via the akka.persistence.journal - all delivery state is saved atomically at the time it is saved, rather than through continuously overwriting snapshots.
  2. Periodically take snapshots and cleanup the journal in the background, as delivery state is churned. Just do this automatically.
  3. Automatically recover all delivery state at startup.
  4. Don't intend for the user to Persist or Snapshot anything else inside this actor. Delivery state only.

We believe this will make the AtLeastOnceDeliveryActor more performant (smaller serialization / write-size impact), robust (persisted at all checkpoints), and easier to use ("it just works".)

DeDuplicatingReceiverActor

This actor is on the receiving side of an AtLeastOnceDelivery actor, and it is responsible for using a persistent strategy to ensure that messages are never processed more than once.

ExactlyOnceStronglyOrderedDeliveryActor

This actor is responsible for guaranteeing an explicit message delivery order to each individually address recipient. Messages will never be delivered in any order other than FIFO using this actor - the first un-acknowledged message MUST be delivered and ACKed before the next undelivered message will be sent.

Building this solution

To run the build script associated with this solution, execute the following:

Windows

c:\> build.cmd all

Linux / OS X

c:\> build.sh all

If you need any information on the supported commands, please execute the build.[cmd|sh] help command.

This build script is powered by FAKE; please see their API documentation should you need to make any changes to the build.fsx file.

Conventions

The attached build script will automatically do the following based on the conventions of the project names added to this project:

  • Any project name ending with .Tests will automatically be treated as a XUnit2 project and will be included during the test stages of this build script;
  • Any project name ending with .Tests will automatically be treated as a NBench project and will be included during the test stages of this build script; and
  • Any project meeting neither of these conventions will be treated as a NuGet packaging target and its .nupkg file will automatically be placed in the bin\nuget folder upon running the build.[cmd|sh] all command.

DocFx for Documentation

This solution also supports DocFx for generating both API documentation and articles to describe the behavior, output, and usages of your project.

All of the relevant articles you wish to write should be added to the /docs/articles/ folder and any API documentation you might need will also appear there.

All of the documentation will be statically generated and the output will be placed in the /docs/_site/ folder.

Previewing Documentation

To preview the documentation for this project, execute the following command at the root of this folder:

C:\> serve-docs.cmd

This will use the built-in docfx.console binary that is installed as part of the NuGet restore process from executing any of the usual build.cmd or build.sh steps to preview the fully-rendered documentation. For best results, do this immediately after calling build.cmd buildRelease.

Release Notes, Version Numbers, Etc

This project will automatically populate its release notes in all of its modules via the entries written inside RELEASE_NOTES.md and will automatically update the versions of all assemblies and NuGet packages via the metadata included inside common.props.

If you add any new projects to the solution created with this template, be sure to add the following line to each one of them in order to ensure that you can take advantage of common.props for standardization purposes:

<Import Project="..\common.props" />

Code Signing via SignService

This project uses SignService to code-sign NuGet packages prior to publication. The build.cmd and build.sh scripts will automatically download the SignClient needed to execute code signing locally on the build agent, but it's still your responsibility to set up the SignService server per the instructions at the linked repository.

Once you've gone through the ropes of setting up a code-signing server, you'll need to set a few configuration options in your project in order to use the SignClient:

  • Add your Active Directory settings to appsettings.json and
  • Pass in your signature information to the signingName, signingDescription, and signingUrl values inside build.fsx.

Whenever you're ready to run code-signing on the NuGet packages published by build.fsx, execute the following command:

C:\> build.cmd nuget SignClientSecret={your secret} SignClientUser={your username}

This will invoke the SignClient and actually execute code signing against your .nupkg files prior to NuGet publication.

If one of these two values isn't provided, the code signing stage will skip itself and simply produce unsigned NuGet code packages.