.NET Orleans

#1

Post by swyx » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

Re: .NET Orleans

#2

Post by rattray » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

> It was created by Microsoft Research and introduced the Virtual Actor Model as a novel approach to building a new generation of distributed systems for the Cloud era.

Okay, sounds like an academic, Microsofty take on Erlang's Actors? But from docs, sounds like it's at least used in practice at MSFT:

> Since 2011, it has been used extensively in the cloud and on premises by several Microsoft product groups, most notably by game studios, such as 343 Industries and The Coalition as a platform for cloud services behind Halo 4 and 5, and Gears of War 4, as well as by a number of other companies.

> Orleans was open-sourced in January 2015, and attracted many developers that formed one of the most vibrant open source communities in the .NET ecosystem.

Re: .NET Orleans

#3

Post by gmaster1440 » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

It's very interesting to see a solution that tackles the problem of identity and state while continuing to embrace OOP. This is in contrast to the philosophy of many functional programming languages, like Clojure, that avoid[0] this by design.

[0] - https://clojure.org/about/state#actors

Re: .NET Orleans

#4

Post by Thaxll » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

EA/BioWare created an equivalent for some of their online services on the JVM: https://github.com/orbit/orbit

Re: .NET Orleans

#5

Post by oldmanhorton » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #2

> It was created by Microsoft Research and introduced the Virtual Actor Model as a novel approach to building a new generation of distributed systems for the Cloud era. Okay, sounds like an academic, Microsofty take on Erlang's Actors? But from docs, sounds like it's at least used in practice at MSFT: > Since 2011, it has been used extensively in the cloud and on premises by several Microsoft product groups, most not…

It also underpins Service Fabric Actors, I believe

Re: .NET Orleans

#6

Post by The_rationalist » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

How does it compare to Akka?

Re: .NET Orleans

#7

Post by keithnz » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #2

> It was created by Microsoft Research and introduced the Virtual Actor Model as a novel approach to building a new generation of distributed systems for the Cloud era. Okay, sounds like an academic, Microsofty take on Erlang's Actors? But from docs, sounds like it's at least used in practice at MSFT: > Since 2011, it has been used extensively in the cloud and on premises by several Microsoft product groups, most not…

the actor model isn't erlangs, it's actually a surprisingly old idea ( 1973 ). The virtual actor model is an interesting spin on the idea that simplifies a few things.

Orleans itself is quite nice, I've used it a few times on some smallish things. Looking at using it in anger for a large distributed backend system in the nearish future.

Re: .NET Orleans

#8

Post by lwansbrough » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #6

How does it compare to Akka?

Having spent a lot of time with Orleans but very little on Akka, I believe the key difference is the "virtual" part. When you write Orleans code, the presumption is it will be executed on a remote machine, but you don't have to address that machine. The Orleans host does the work of actually assigning ownership of grains and distributing the load between silo nodes. So in your .NET code you simply have to instantiate a grain like you would any other plain old C# class (actually there's usually a factory IIRC), and then you work with its async Task-based methods (a standard and boring concept in modern .NET) which may or may not communicate over the network.