Akka is an implementation of the actor model, which we discussed in the previous chapter for its industrial purposes. If the Cats effect focuses on experimentation and trials with new technologies, then Akka focuses on providing the industry with the tools that can solve large-scale problems. Of course, we can expect cats to mature to that level as well, however, if you are going to work with concurrency and asynchrony in Scala in a real-world situation, it is likely you will encounter Akka.
The purpose of this book is to make you comfortable with modern technologies in functional programming that are in demand in real-world situations. Since concurrent and asynchronous programming is ubiquitous, we are going to discuss the tools that are most widely used to tackle its challenges. We will start by looking at the principles on which Akka is built.