About Us
Our Story
Increasingly amazed about the complexity of configuring, deploying and monitoring scalable applications in popular stateless cloud platforms, we decided that it was time to bring the promising virtual actor way of cloud computing to the next level.
Virtual actors are stateful objects that can seemlessly move from one process to the other without loss of data. All of this reincarnation magic is handled by the framework, invisible to client applications. This results in power, flexibility and simplicity when it comes to the development and deployment of scalable applications that is unmatched by traditional cloud solutions like AWS Lambda and Azure and Google Functions that put the burdon of synchronization and persisting state on the shoulder of the developer.
We are driven by values
We believe that tools must adapt to your processes, not the other way around. This conviction leads us to our 5 different core values of freedom that are described below.
Freedom of deployment
We do not want to force you into one or another way of deployment. Darlean solutions can be deployed bare metal or containerized, to windows or linux, to cloud or edge, as only one node for simple applications or scaled up to 1000’s of nodes or more for the most advanced systems.
Freedom of language
We leave it up to you to choose the best language for the job. Every language that supports websockets can communicate with Darlean. Because actors can invoke actors in another node just as easy as actors in their own node, full language interoperability is achieved between the parts of your multi-language solution.
Freedom of extension
ALthough we strive to provide as many useful integrations as possible, we are realistic enough to realize that there will always be demand for integrations we do not yet provide. Because all integrations (including our own) are provided as separate applications, you can easily write your own integrations and add them as a separate application to your solution. No need to recompile or even stop the runtime for that.
Freedom of independency
In order to simplify development and deployment, we believe that a virtual actor framework should come with batteries included. No auxiliary services (like storage providers, message brokers or databases) are required for running Darlean. Darlean comes ready-to-go equipped with powerful and scalable state storage, high performance message bus and virtual actor directory.
Freedom of scale
Every part of Darlean is designed to provide practically unlimited horizontal scalability. This includes the actor placement directory, internal communication bus, on-disk persistence provider, persistent timers and all of the other helpers mentioned below. With the same ease that Darlean is able to power a cluster of 1000’s of nodes or more, it can be scaled down all the way until it is no more than one single light-weight process that is perfectly suited to host the very smallest of applications (like simple websites) or run on a developer machine.