The Actor Model and why you should be using it

You are probably familiar with the object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, but what about the actor model? The actor model is designed for concurrent programming and is an easy way to create systems that do many things at once. For example, the actor model is an excellent way to implement IoT (Internet of Things) applications or take advantage of the processing power of multiple CPU cores. Actors provide a natural way to model and reason about concurrent systems, especially for developers working in object-oriented languages. In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of the actor model. You will learn how actors work, communicate, and act as state machines. You will see how groups of actors cooperate in distributed, scalable, and fault tolerant systems. The session will include code examples in Akka.NET, which is a toolkit for C# and F#. At the end of this session, you will know the strengths and weaknesses of actor systems, and when they may help you solve a problem.