Some large companies are using a variation of SMACK in production, particularly those looking at how to take their pipeline data projects forward.
Apache Spark is beginning to attract more large software vendors to support it as it fulfils different needs than Hadoop.
SMACK is becoming a new modern requirement for companies as they move from the initial pilot phases into relying on pipeline data for their revenues.
The point of this book is to give you alternatives.
One example involves replacing individual components. Yarn could be used as the cluster scheduler instead of Mesos, while Apache Flink would be a suitable batch and stream processing alternative to Akka. There are many alternatives to SMACK.
The fundamental premise of SMACK is to build an end-to-end data-processing pipeline having these components interacting in a way that makes integration simple and getting tasks up-and-running is quick, rather than requiring huge amounts of effort to get the tools to play nicely with each other.
