Case Study: Flowdock achieves reliable, high-performance scalable messaging (1,700 messages/sec) with Akka (Typesafe)

Flowdock scales messaging with Akka

Flowdock, founded in Helsinki in 2009, is a team collaboration tool that consolidates activity from project management, version control and support channels into a single stream so teams can react in seconds. The company needed a highly performant, scalable core-messaging service that Ruby couldn’t comfortably support; after evaluating Node.js and Erlang, the team chose a JVM-based Actor model to meet their performance and interoperability needs.

Flowdock implemented the messaging core in Scala using the Akka toolkit: a three‑person team delivered the ~2,000‑line service to production within months and iterated over nine months. The result was a reliable, highly concurrent system that routinely handles 1,700 messages/second, leverages JVM libraries for tasks like HTML sanitization, supports multi‑provider redundant infrastructure for fast recovery, and helped drive the product’s growth and eventual acquisition by Rally Software.

Flowdock

Otto Hilska

Founder