Erlang has made popular the notation of asynchronous message passing as means of distribution and Scaling. While the idea of “actors” is fundamentally simple, how do we, the software engineers, make use of this abstraction to develop real life, scalable systems? This talk designs a scalable distributed search service using Akka and Scala using the “zen” of Actor based design. It covers the basics of message passing, designing topologies and handling failure and moves onto a few common patterns in actors system design, including service overload detection and tracking user sessions.