Reactive microservices are all about building stateful systems that remain responsive under almost all conditions and make optimal use of computing resources. The Akka Platform includes Play, Akka, and Lagom, which enable you to build and operate Reactive microservices in the most robust manner possible.

Platforms such as Kubernetes support scaling and recovery from failures at the infrastructure level, but leave complex problems such as managing state to applications. Reactive microservices scale state up and down effortlessly across a cluster. This means they can handle many concurrent requests with large volumes of data, while remaining resilient in the face of failures.

For example, in the retail world, sales revenue depends on the system remaining highly responsive—even under the heavy load of Black Friday, a flash sale, or during unexpected failures. Lightbend Platform users have successfully met this challenge. Their Reactive systems ensure that fresh data is available at all times so that customers can continue to add products to their carts and finalize their purchases in spite of spikes in load and intermittent connectivity issues.