Explore the Akka framework for building scalable and fault-tolerant applications in this comprehensive conference talk. Learn how Akka combines Actors and Software Transactional Memory to create a unified runtime and programming model for scaling both vertically and horizontally. Discover how Akka abstracts away the complexities of location and network transparency, enabling adaptive load-balancing, cluster rebalancing, replication, and partitioning. Gain insights into solving hard scalability problems and walk through a real-world case study implementing a highly scalable and fault-tolerant compute grid. Delve into Akka's architecture, learning how to create and manage actors, handle messaging, configure deployments, and leverage the runtime's features. Understand the big picture of Akka's capabilities and explore practical implementations, from simple setups to supervised services and custom provisioning.