In case you didn’t notice yet, we are using Akka internally to handle certain aspects of Kamon’s infrastructure, like using actor messages to support the metrics and trace subscription protocols, relying on Akka IO for UDP communication in the StatsD and Datadog modules and using Spray for our New Relic backend, which in turn builds on top of Akka.

Using Akka and Spray has been cool in many aspects, including the fact that by relying on them we bring a very small number of dependencies into our user’s classpath, but also comes with a little limitation: the Akka, Spray, Play! and Kamon’s Akka version need to be synchronized for all to work properly. It means, we need to publish artifacts targeting specific Akka, Spray and Play! versions, as well as having special handling on certain configuration settings to keep Kamon’s actor system separated from our user’s actor system, if any.

That doesn’t seem to be hard, but the code base for supporting Akka 2.2 every day differs a bit more from what is necessary to support Akka 2.3 and maintaining it turns out to be a little pain we don’t want to suffer anymore. So, once Akka 2.4 is released we will switch our main code base to Akka 2.4 and kill support for Akka 2.2. Of course, despite the small number of downloads for the _akka-2.2 artifacts, we will continue to publish artifacts for Akka 2.2 until Akka 2.4 is available, so you still have a few months to plan your upgrade :).

One more thing to note is that even while Akka 2.3 and Akka 2.4 are advised to be binary compatible, you can’t use a Kamon version built for Akka 2.3 with Akka 2.4, so even while the code base will apparently remain the same, the main artifacts will target Akka 2.4 and there will be a secondary set of artifacts with the _akka-2.3 suffix targeting Akka 2.3.

Thanks to some experiments done by Kailuo Wang, we now know that the current code base is compatible with Akka 2.4-M1 so we decided to publish a Kamon snapshot as well targeting that version, you can now find Kamon 0.4.1-35bb09838d1b0a2a1e36cd68c2db158b728a2981 in our snapshots repository. Just remember to change the module names to include the _akka-2.4 suffix, like in kamon-core_akka-2.4 and so on.

We hope you have fun with this snapshot and of course, that you report back if there is any inconvenient while using it!