A brief journey through the scaling that we had to deal with at Zeebox, and how running on the JVM allowed us to bring some very effective and mature tools to bear on profiling & load-testing tools to bear, how we primarily use Akka as an asynchronous/event-driven framework far more than we use it as an Actor framework, how we use JSON as the lingua-franca across hundreds of nodes in EC2, and how the ability to create DSLs in Scala and to easily create the right abstractions made it far easier to test ideas and to rapidly change bad decisions.

Talk objectives: Explore how Scala and Akka fit within a larger framework of ideas in a real-world setting; such as Agile project management, RESTful web services, cloud computing, and the ever-popular social networking!

Target audience: Anyone curious about the suitability of Scala for use in a new or existing project, and anyone investigating potential technologies for a large multiple-component cloud based architecture.