Everyone in the Scala world is using or looking into using Akka for low-latency, scalable, distributed or concurrent systems. We want to share our story of developing and productionizing multiple Akka apps, including low-latency ingestion and real-time processing systems, and Spark-based applications. * When does one use actors vs futures? * Why did we go with Logback instead of Akka's built-in logging? * Can we use Akka with, or in place of, Storm? * How did we set up instrumentation and monitoring in production? * How does one use VisualVM to debug Akka apps in production? * What happens if the mailbox gets full? * What is our Akka stack like? We will share best practices that we've discovered when building Akka and Scala apps, pitfalls and things we'd like to avoid, and a vision of where we would like to go for ideal Akka monitoring, instrumentation, and debugging facilities.