We will share how Thirty Meter Telescope is utilizing Akka-Typed based actor-messaging as a communication backbone to coordinate hundreds of hardware components.

-------------------------------------------

Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is going to be world's largest optical telescope once operational. It consists of multiple hardware component each supporting a custom communication protocol at firmware level. Telescope observation requires coordination across these components for tasks such as mirror rotation, instrument and filter selection etc. This talk will discuss how Akka-Typed based actor-messaging layer on top of these custom protocols enabled the task of building higher level operational software with relative ease.

We will show that Akka-Typed allowed creating type-safe protocol layer and how akka actors helped with state management in presence async concurrent communication. In addition, we will discuss how support for lifecycle events, fault tolerance and supervision in actor model turned out to be a great fit for the task. This work is done as an open source project on github.

Service Discovery is an important aspect of microservices, particularly when using containers on elastic infrastructure. Most popular approaches for service discovery require a standalone 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.

Organizational Patterns study by Jim Coplien done throughout 90s forms the foundation of Agile. Its important to understand these patterns and go beyond  'popular practices' like stand ups, user stories and TDD. Individuals are important and there are certain characteristics of these individuals which makes a team Agile or not. This presentation covers some of the very important patterns which form the basis of Agile, without these, any Agile project is bound to fail.

Jeff Sutherland, creator of scrum, now actively uses Organizational patterns to explain acrum and also started an effort at www.scrumplop.com to collect patterns which make Scrum work.

Several years back I was reading some articles by Vinoba Bhave about Non violent organizations. I found striking silimarity between thoughts expressed in those articles and principles of Agile.  The original article was in Marathi. I got it translated in English and discussed the similarities with several Agile leaders. They found that there indeed this similarity. 

Reading about non violent organizations, helped me understand self-organization in Agile/Scrum a lot better than any book on Scrum or Agile. This in fact changed my understanding completely and helped me think beyond popular Agile practices like TDD, Pairing etc.

The talk will show links between principles of Agile and Non violent organizations.