Case Study: Abiquo achieves massive, predictable scaling and parallel VM provisioning with Akka (Typesafe)

Scaling out with Akka at Abiquo

Abiquo is an enterprise cloud management platform that lets organizations manage large, globally deployed private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructures and multiple hypervisors from a single pane of glass. Its Java-based platform hit a scalability ceiling because a central node made synchronous calls to the Virtualization Factory, creating a bottleneck that limited throughput and left users without progress feedback during long configuration tasks.

Abiquo refactored the system to an asynchronous, message-driven architecture using RabbitMQ and Typesafe’s Akka actor model, creating supervisor actors and dynamic pools of hypervisor-specific workers to run configuration tasks in parallel. The change eliminated the bottleneck, enabled detailed user status updates for subtasks, and scaled to monitor many thousands of hypervisors (hundreds of thousands of VMs across datacenters), after which Akka was adopted in other parts of the platform.

Abiquo

Albert Puig

Senior Engineer