Reactive Summit 2016

In this talk, we will review an experience of rearchitecting and migrating a system that appeared reactive and microservice-based, but was in fact a monolith with RPC calls to a truly reactive architecture.

The migration work had to be done without causing disruption to the current system, and without taking time to rewrite the system. The result is a biometric computer vision system with a distributed domain in Akka / Scala with storage in Apache Cassandra, with the computer vision components in OpenCV in C++, connected with RabbitMQ and with batch analytics code in Apache Spark.

This talk will show the architectural and code smells that were the result of half-harted reactive implementation and the way to address them, but also the impact of the changes on privacy and security of the stored biometric information.