Summary
Welcome to the March 2026 Akka.NET Community Standup! Since our last meetup on February 18th, we've had 3 core releases and 6 ecosystem releases across the Akka.NET ecosystem with critical cluster sharding fixes, logging stability improvements, and a major Phobos observability upgrade:
Key Highlights:
- 🛠️ Critical Cluster Sharding Fixes: v1.5.61 resolves shard handoff failures during scale-up events, remember-entities flag mismatches, and ShardCoordinator self-comparison bugs
- 🐛 VectorClock Correctness: v1.5.61 fixes inequality operators (
!= and <) that could produce incorrect cluster convergence decisions
- 🛡️ Logging Stability: v1.5.62 prevents third-party logger crashes caused by malformed log format strings
- 📊 Phobos 2.11.0 - Log-Trace Correlation: First-class log-trace correlation replaces the deprecated span event approach, enabling seamless navigation between logs and traces in Seq, Grafana Loki, and Datadog
- 🔧 Azure Coordination Fix: Akka.Management v1.5.61 works around a known Azure SDK bug where
CreateIfNotExistsAsync could throw 409 conflicts
- 📦 Persistence.Sql Assembly Fix: v1.5.60.1 resolves a linq2db assembly binding conflict that prevented projects from building
Looking Ahead:
- v1.6 development: 32 open / 20 closed issues in milestone
- v1.5.62 patch milestone: 14 open issues in active development
- Serialization PoC prototype for v1.6
- .NET Aspire integration plugin for Akka.NET
Join us as we discuss these updates, hear about Grimmloch (an AI-powered multiplayer game server built with Akka.NET), and share future plans!
Recent Akka.NET Releases (since February 18, 2026)
Akka.NET v1.5.61 - February 26, 2026
Akka.Cluster.Sharding Bug Fixes
- [ ] Fixed shard handoff failures during scale-up (#8055) - Fixes #7500. Ports Pekko ShardStopped handler and adds a handoff safety net, resolving a critical issue where shards could fail to hand off indefinitely during scale-up events.