Apache Pekko - An Akka Fork to build powerful reactive, concurrent, and distributed applications

Apache has recently announced that fork of Akka and named the project as Pekko. It is still in incubation.

Akka

Akka is a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications for Java and Scala. It has concept of Actor and Streams that helps to build systems that scale up, using the resources of a server more efficiently. It is reactive and allows developers to  write systems that self-heal and stay responsive in the face of failures. Akka allows you to focus on meeting business needs instead of writing low-level code to provide reliable behavior, fault tolerance, and high performance.

Akka is basically a powerful toolkit and helps programmers to build distributed systems. Lightbend is the company behind Akka, changed its license from Apache to BSL v1.1 (Business Source License) starting with Akka v2.7.

Pekko

Pekko is a fork of the Akka project just before its licence changed from Apache 2 to Business Source License 1.1. Pekko is a toolkit and an ecosystem for building highly concurrent, distributed, reactive and resilient applications for Java and Scala. Pekko also provides a rich set of libraries built on top of Actors to solve modern problems including Streams, HTTP Server and Client, Connectors, gRpc etc.

It is certainly good decision by Apache members to fork Akka as it is being widely used in many projects. Apache Flink uses Akka to provide stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. Apache incubation period will be around 1 - 2 years and hopefully they will turnaround and make Pekko a better alternative to Akka.