title: routing and load balancing with AKKA instead of regular NLB
body: <p>We are building an OLTP gateway, were this gateway has the following (partly) requirements:<br>
  High-throughput and low latency, no single point of failure, and fully scalable solution with initial capability for 500 tps per instance and scalable to 5000 tps.
  (but of course :-))<br>
  The gateway will also have to integrate with third party services (like - acquiring banks, alternative payment methods and other implementations).<br>
  We have many system zones (and modules within) so for the sake of clarity I will mention two:<br>
  Core Gateway zone – encapsulates many modules consisting together the OLTP engine.<br>
  And Back-end Integration zone - for these third party services implementations.<br>
  Our system zones separation considered the ability to scale module independently in a clustered environment when the module overloads.  </p>
  
  <p>We are working with java and we plan on using AKKA and Camel platforms as the basis for the gateway OLTP architecture.<br>
  We chose these platforms for their well known advanced features.<br>
  We are new to AKKA and Camel platforms so we did a lot of research and learning over the web and we feel very confident with its capabilities.  </p>
  
  <p><strong>So right now our main concern is with AKKA's routing and load balancing messages/requests/work between our modules and system zones.</strong><br>
  We try to find out if using a regular NLB between our system zones will be a better choice to go with.<br>
  We try to measure our decision according to the following parameters and order:<br>
  1.  Performance<br>
  2.  Known and successive implementation<br>
  3.  Statistics<br>
  4.  Fault-tolerant<br>
  5.  Routing strategies<br>
  6.  Configuration<br>
  7.  Debugging on (near) real time<br>
  We believe that the sections 4-6 in the above list can easily satisfied by AKKA and we wonder about the first three and section 7…<br>
  We have researched over the web for information about AKKA's routing and load balancing and came out with many good articles.<br>
  <a href="http://prochera.com/blog/2014/07/15/building-a-scalable-and-highly-available-reactive-applications-with-akka-load-balancing-revisited/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://prochera.com</a> | <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4493001/good-use-case-for-akka">use case for akka (stackoverflow)</a> (also akka's docs and I have some more links)
  But we did not found much of information that will help us to decide which is the better approach (AKKA's routing and load balancing VS regular NLB)  </p>
  
  <p><strong>So finally here are banch of questions concerning our dilemma:</strong><br>
  1.  Can you provide some statistics on AKKA's routing and load balancing performance in distributed systems?<br>
  2.  Can you provide comparison between AKKA's routing and load balancing VS regular NLB?<br>
  3.  Can you provide known and successive implementation in the market?<br>
  4.  Is there known problems/cons using AKKA's routing and load balancing?<br>
  5.  We wonder on a solution that implements AKKA yet let external load balancing do the inter-machine communications - which can be replaced by all AKKA mechanism at a later phase.
  Can you think of one (high level)?<br>
  6.  Can AKKA perform sticky based load balancing onto multiple back-end servers?<br>
  7.  Is it easy to debug / log trace on (near) real time the AKKA's routing and load balancing?</p>
  
  <p>Would really appreciate some feedbacks.<br>
  Tzvika</p>