Can an Akka.net node hosted within a container participate in a cluster outside of the container host?

Question

I'm fairly new to Akka.net and I'm a total noob when it comes to containers so please forgive me if this is too simple (but I kind of hope it is).

I'm trying to build a web app cluster using Azure app services. I want the lighthouse to be hosted in an Azure container instance. I've been successful putting the cluster together on my local box (without docker). I've tried standing up a local docker container with port forwarding but I haven't been able to get it to work.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

You can definitely do this, but since you're using Azure App Services I'd recommend taking a look at Akka.Management and Akka.Disovery.Azure instead.

This will eliminate the need to use Lighthouse at all - and instead your nodes can form a cluster on Azure App Service by querying a shared Azure Table Storage table instead.

There's a complete Azure App Services demo that shows how to do this here: https://github.com/petabridge/azure-app-service-akkadotnet

And the relevant code is here: https://github.com/petabridge/azure-app-service-akkadotnet/blob/dev/src/Akka.ShoppingCart/Startup.cs

NOTE: this uses the Akka.Hosting methods, which eliminates 99% of HOCON configuration and ties into Microsoft.Extensions for configuration, hosting, and DI. Akka.Hosting is a relatively new package and just hit stable at the end of 2022. You should definitely use it - all of the documentation and examples will be reworked to incorporate it once Akka.NET v1.5 ships at the end of February, 2023.