Architecture Overview

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Bird’s eye view

GoAkt is a framework for building concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems in Go using the actor model. Every unit of computation is an actor—a lightweight, isolated entity that communicates exclusively through messages. The Actor System is the top-level runtime that hosts actors and orchestrates messaging, clustering, and lifecycle.

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Three deployment modes

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Core building blocks

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Message flow

For remote messages, the remoting layer serializes the payload over a custom TCP frame protocol with optional compression.

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Actor hierarchy

When a parent stops, all children stop first (depth-first). A parent supervises its children.

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Cluster architecture

Placement and membership state (which actors and grains live where) is stored in Olric (distributed hash map) with configurable quorum. Node membership uses Hashicorp Memberlist. CRDT application state (when enabled via ClusterConfig.WithCRDT) is replicated separately by the Replicator actor using delta broadcast over the topic bus—not through Olric DMap writes.

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Deep dives

The following pages describe the internal architecture of each major subsystem:

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See also

• Code Map — package layout and file-level responsibilities
• Design Decisions — rationale behind architectural choices