Message brokers and Actors are a possibility using akka-camel. Camel has its purpose as an integration framework for you application, and the message broker can isolate tecnology stacks from one another, overcoming incompatibilities eg. between older and newer versions of Akka.
This very simple example shows how to setup ActiveMQ, Camel and send a Ping/Pong message from two actors. One actor is the PingGenerator that sends a case class to the Pong actor. The PingGenerator has a PingProducer that sends a message to the queue using a Request/Response Message Exchange Pattern. The Pong actor subscribes to the queue and processes the message, creates a new case class, the PongMessage and sends the PingGenerator a response, thus completing the cycle.
The project uses docker and docker-compose to launch it. There are two scripts, the run.sh to run the example and
the test.sh to run tests.