Tag Archives: akka.net

Using Akka.NET with ASP.NET Core – Creating a Quiz API

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This is a template and quick start guide for Akka.NET with ASP.NET Core. You can grab the concepts of using Akka.NET with ASP.NET Core and how Akka.NET actor model can be used in a simple quiz or survey based scenario.

But at the same time, this post will not provide all the fundamentals of actor model programming or Akka.NET. It assumes that you already have the understanding of the actor model and reactive programming basics, along with the some practical experience with the concepts of Akka.NET.

Scenario :  A quiz engine has many quizzes and users can attend the quizzes. Each user can attend many quizzes as possible at the same time. So each user session is associated with a quiz. One user can have many quiz sessions at the same time. A simplest session key is a combination of quiz Id and user Id. This combination is unique and referred as a session Id. Each session is an actor.

Also a template actor provides the quiz templates during the session creation. Each session actor gets the fresh copy of the quiz during session creation.

The below diagram shows the actor system used in this scenario.

Akka.NET actor model for quiz engine

Step by step explanation

  • In the ASP.NET Core Startup class the actor system (QuizActorSystem) is instantiated.
  • QuizMasterActor is created in the context of QuizActorSystem and the QuizActorSystem is added to the ASP.NET Core services collection, to be consumed by the controllers.
  • QuizMasterActor creates QuizSessionCoordinatorActor and QuizTemplateActor under its context.
  • For simplicity the QuizController of ASP.NET Core has two actions.
    1. GetQuestion – This gets session Id and question Id. The controller asks for the session actor from QuizSessionCoordinatorActor. If the session actor is already available it will be returned else QuizSessionCoordinatorActor will create a new session actor under its context. QuizSessionActor loads the quiz from the QuizTemplateActor in the initial creation, gets the fresh copy of the quiz and returns the requested question. Consequent requests will be served directly by the QuizSessionActor.
    2. GetAnswer – This action methods takes the session Id and the answer for the question and pass it to the right QuizSessionActor for the update.

The entire QuizSessionActor tree is created upon the request for a question under a specific session and this is quite safe and straight forward.

You can download the source code from this Github repo.

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Microsoft Orleans #IMO

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IMO, Microsoft Orleans is a framework and an implementation for developing highly distributed concurrent applications, which can also be considered as a wrapper or a developer friendliness (or the so called developer productivity) coated actor framework.

Microsoft Orleans said to be having the concept/notion of virtual actors and optimized for cloud. As in production Orleans is deployed in Azure cloud services and on premise deployment. IMO – The production implementation of the Orleans is quite challenging compared to Akka.NET implementations.

The idea behind the developer friendliness is quite confusing; the so called developer friendliness is achieved through abstracting and hiding plenty of underlying concepts of actors model and some areas Orleans has key breaches to the actor model as well. In that sense one can argue that Orleans is not an actor framework. So if you’re a person who is into details, you might find it bit less involved, but if you’re a developer who really want to create a quick solution for a burning business issue this is ok.

I highly recommend, you to read actor model and how it works and then get into Orleans as this would give clear picture of Orleans and how it is implemented.

If I’m to tell the fundamental difference between Orleans and Akka.NET based on the developer learning aspect, it is same as the exact difference between Java and C#. Java is pure (recent versions are quite different, if you have used Java 1.5/1.6 you’d understand) on object orient programming and a good tool to learn the real concepts of OOP. But C# has OOP features but not a strict follower of it, on top of the OOP concepts it goes beyond the OOP language constructs in order to achieve developer friendliness and productivity.

Orleans is a derived innovation on top of the actor model concept and Akka.NET is more over a real mapped implementation of actor model.