On the Radar: Lightbend’s Kalix cloud native platform

Summary

Catalyst

Cloud native computing is the new wave in software development, which offers many advantages over traditional monolithic programming. However, going cloud native is also complex ‒ with so many tools on the market, developers are faced with a “surfeit of choices” dilemma along with the usual market fragmentation challenges in picking the winners. Lightbend offers a way round these challenges, giving developers a one-stop platform in Kalix that offers the complete Kubernetes-based cloud native experience, without the learning curve and administration headaches that involve multiple tools.

Omdia view

Cloud native computing exploits the cloud to best advantage by building applications with microservices architecture, deployed in containers that are managed by Kubernetes. Microservices decouple components in an application, making it easier to build resilient and robust applications that can scale out rapidly and back to zero depending on demand. Microservices can also be replaced in a live running application, meaning that there is less application downtime.

While Kubernetes is a “brand” of container orchestration and management (and is free and open source), it is also the winner in the market, as most cloud native vendors work within the Kubernetes ecosystem. For a cloud native solution to be successful in today’s market it therefore needs to be Kubernetes based, which is the case with Lightbend Kalix. Kalix is an evolution of Lightbend Akka, the Scala-based framework for running concurrent distributed applications on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Kalix sits on top of Akka and offers a platform as a service (PaaS) for cloud native microservices and APIs. Kalix is a complete, out-of-the-box cloud native stack, with a NoOps approach that makes it easy for developers to adopt, as well as being enterprise ready with high performance and rapid scalability.

Why put Lightbend Kalix on your radar?

Creating cloud native applications is complex, involving writing microservices for scalability, wiring them together, integrating them with distributed databases, and managing the operations requirements. Kalix abstracts this complexity and offers a serverless/NoOps experience for developers, so they can focus on writing the application business logic. Users can benefit from the high performance and scalability of Akka without having to manage it, and without having to consider service meshes, caches, and Kubernetes.

While Kalix is built with Scala, as a generic PaaS, developers can code in most languages of their choice. Lightbend has multiple language SDKs.

Analyst comment

The market for cloud native PaaS solutions has to contend with enterprise container management platforms on one side and serverless computing on the other. Kalix is positioned toward the serverless end but is not serverless from a billing viewpoint. However, its hybrid approach offering NoOps/serverless style in all other respects will be most suited to enterprises with significant cloud native workloads that do not necessarily just want short running functions but want to build enterprise-grade microservices-based applications.

Kalix runs on the major clouds and despite adding a premium to the usual cost of the cloud provider, by virtue of optimizing its footprint on the cloud for the client, it can reduce like-for-like public cloud expenditure.

The key selling point of Kalix is its Akka foundation, which offers high-performance computing, running distributed services without the need to manage them. Kalix is not for every application: it has yet to launch its edge computing capability, it has no on-premises solution, being a purely managed service (but can accommodate sovereign cloud requirements for example), and has no tooling for front-end development. However, it deserves greater awareness in a crowded market that has many “me too” solutions that are all too similar while Kalix offers a superior experience.

Market context

Working with the cloud native computing model requires experience with many tools and concepts that developers new to the architecture can find challenging. However, there is also pressure from organizations to build modern cloud native applications as part of their cloud/digital transformation. PaaS solutions offer a way for greater abstraction of the complexities that underly cloud native and give developers a better experience. However, PaaS offerings vary in how much abstraction is available. Kalix can be compared with a serverless or NoOps approach in terms of the ease of use and the focus on business application coding. While Kalix does not have a microsecond CPU usage billing granularity, it does offer a no-contract pay-as-you-go option, as well as an enterprise-friendly billing scheme.

Product/service overview

The high-performance capability of Kalix is due to the underlying Akka foundation, which resides in memory for fast access. Akka is written in Scala, which uses the Actor model, and a Reactive architecture, which is most suitable for high performance, concurrent, and distributed systems. The user experience is good for developers that do not have to be concerned with thread locking and management, as Akka manages this for the user. Akka is also self-healing in that it reacts to hardware failures by automatically taking remedial action. Kalix supports a polyglot programming environment (e.g., Spring and JavaScript/TypeScript).

Kalix is designed for building the backend of applications. It is not a frontend GUI builder but has a wide range of use cases, from mobile backend as a service, business service APIs, and IoT/digital twin development. Another benefit of Kalix is that it offers out-of-the-box enterprise-grade security and compliance. Kalix includes zero-trust security, multi-factor authentication, encryption in storage and flight, client-side certification, isolated and dedicated data stores, network isolation, and more. Kalix compliance includes SOC 2, software supply chain verification, vulnerability management, and data sovereignty.

Kalix also uses global distributed databases such as YugaByte and Spanner the database and its persistence model is managed by Lightbend. The integrations for messaging and communications are one of the more challenging aspects of cloud native computing. Kalix works with service meshes, API gateways, message brokers, and network address translation (NAT) gateways, all under the hood so that users do not have to install and configure these tools, it abstracts away this complexity.

Kalix offers developers a NoOps experience in that activities normally performed by operators are automated in the platform: activities such as Kubernetes configuration, container management, database administration, backup and disaster recovery, observability, auto-scaling, secrets management, load balancing, and 24/7 support.

Kalix currently runs on AWS using EKS, Google Cloud using GKE, and on the roadmap for 2023 is Microsoft Azure using AKS, and is a managed service, the user can choose which cloud service to run on. Lightbend passes on the cost of running on the host cloud, it offers three billing options:

• Pay as you go: Usage-based pricing, for a limited number of projects in a single cloud environment, and 9 am to 5 pm business hours email support
• Enterprise (multi-tenant): Annual usage capacity pricing, for an unlimited number of projects, cloud and region of choice, and 24/7 support
• Dedicated (single tenant): As enterprise but with a secure and isolated environment and pre-production support.

Kalix users receive an optimized footprint on the cloud host, so that costs typically reduce by moving to Kalix. Migrating microservices architecture applications to Kalix or building greenfield applications on it is the preferred route. Lift and shift of monoliths is less advisable unless the move is to modernize and break up the monoliths into microservices.

Company information

Background

Lightbend (formerly known as Typesafe, rebranded in 2016) was co-founded in 2011 by Jonas Boner, president and CEO, who created the Akka event-driven middleware project; Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala programming language; and Paul Phillips. Apart from building its technology in Scala, Lightbend is a proponent of Reactive programming and is a major contributor to Reactive Streams open source project. The company has secured VC funding to series C, worth in total to date $42m.

Current position

Lightbend has office locations in San Francisco, Quebec, Lausanne (Switzerland), and Uppsala (Sweden). Kalix was first launched in May 2022, offered as a PaaS. It continues to offer Akka, the self-managed framework for running large-scale distributed applications. Lightbend has more than 150 customers worldwide; its customers focus on building scalable, high-performance cloud native microservices and APIs. Key technology and business partners include AWS, Google, Azure, Yugabyte, Grafana, YoppWorks, Wipro, and Infosys.

Future plans

Currently, Lightbend’s focus is on server-side computing, but the company has a roadmap for edge computing and supporting technologies like WebAssembly. It is already building a foundation for this by supporting brokerless service-to-service communications, which would be appropriate for the edge with its typically low footprint requirements.

Key facts

Table 1: Data sheet: Lightbend

Appendix

On the Radar

On the Radar is a series of research notes about vendors bringing innovative ideas, products, or business models to their markets. On the Radar vendors bear watching for their potential impact on markets as their approach, recent developments, or strategy could prove disruptive and of interest to tech buyers and users.

Further reading

Omdia Universe: Container Management Solutions, 2022–23 (April 2022)

Author

Michael Azoff, Chief Analyst, Cloud and Data Center Practice

askananalyst@omdia.com