Akka Persistence integrates with Akka Cluster by providing stateful actors, called Persistent Actors, which store their internal state as events in an event log. This enables the recovery of actor state after crashes or node failures within a clustered environment.
Benefits :
1. Fault tolerance : Actor state is preserved across crashes and node failures, ensuring system resilience.
2. Scalability : Stateful actors can be distributed across cluster nodes, allowing for horizontal scaling.
3. Event sourcing : Storing events allows for easy auditing, debugging, and analysis of system behavior.
Drawbacks :
1. Increased complexity : Implementing persistent actors requires additional code and understanding of event sourcing concepts.
2. Performance overhead : Persisting events introduces latency and potential bottlenecks in high-throughput systems.
3. Data storage management : Choosing and managing appropriate data stores for event logs adds operational complexity.
