In Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), service compositions provide the key tool for building complex, flexible, distributed, and cross-boundary functionality from elementary services (and the composition can be exposed as services themselves). Yet, while conversion of atomic and back-end services from centralized servers to cloud platforms has been largely successful, the composition layer often remains a bottleneck due to the prevailing reliance on transactional state management.

The composition layer can be re-engineered for horizontal and vertical scalability by moving away from the concurrency model dominated by heavy-weight components (such as virtual machines and database transactions) towards a finer-grained model of concurrent and distributed computing based on actor systems.

In this talk we’ll look at a scheme for automatically transforming the traditional (orchestration-style) service compositions into Cloud-friendly actor networks, which can benefit from high performance, location transparency, clustering, load balancing, and integration capabilities of modern actor systems, such as Akka.