We believe that one should never have to choose between productivity and scalability, which has been the case with traditional approaches to concurrency and distribution. The cause of that has been the wrong tools and the wrong layer of abstraction and Akka is here to change that. Akka is a unified runtime and programming model for scaling both UP (utilizing multi-core processors) and OUT (utilizing the grid/cloud). With Akka 2 this will be taken to a whole new level with its “Distributed by Design”. Akka 2 provides location transparency by abstracting away both these tangents of scalability by turning them into an operations and configuration task. This gives the Akka runtime freedom to do adaptive automatic load-balancing, cluster rebalancing, replication and partitioning. Akka is available at akka.io (under Apache 2 license).