Akka Cluster: calling actors by path

Question

My use case is that I want to set up a cluster of nodes which run Akka Actors. Each actor would be an instance of the same actor to handle a WebSocket connection to a certain user. Each actor would register itself with a unique path. On a non-clustered setup I can simply call an actor by its path like system.actorSelection(s"user/$client") where $client is a unique name to an actor instance. I have to pass messages to these actors so they can then send it back to their respective WebSocket client.

Apparently Akka Cluster offers a variety of setup: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/scala/cluster-usage.html

I want to run my nodes on Kubernetes where I can't reliable configure instance names/domains as instances will be coming and going.

What is the simplest set up for Akka Cluster in this scenario?

Answer 1

Did not see any impact with Kubernetes. For your case, I think akka cluster sharding is just for you, use shardRegion to get the proper sharded actor & send message to it directly. For every docker instance just need to make itself as part of cluster node, then not necessary to use a fixed address to find an actor, then, instance dynamic join & leave are all ok.