You’ve heard all of the hype, but how can SMACK work for you? In this all-star lineup, you will learn how to create a reactive, scaling, resilient and performant data processing powerhouse. Bringing Akka, Kafka and Mesos together provides a foundation to develop and operate an elastically scalable actor system. We will go through the basics of Akka, Kafka and Mesos and then deep dive into putting them together in an end2end (and back again) distrubuted transaction. Distributed transactions mean producers waiting for one or more of consumers to respond. We'll also go through automated ways to failure induce these systems (using LinkedIn Simoorg) and trace them from start to stop through each component (using Twitters Zipkin). Finally, you will see how Apache Cassandra and Spark can be combined to add the incredibly scaling storage and data analysis needed in fast data pipelines. With these technologies as a foundation, you have the assurance that scale is never a problem and uptime is default.