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.NET Orleans

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41–50 of 287 posts

Re: .NET Orleans

#42
post #39

I only ran into the Orleans Virtual Actor model a few days ago. I have an application I long wanted to move to a distributed model, and I've been struggling with seemingly to reinvent everything due to an unusual execution model. So it was quite an eye opener to read about how Orleans introduced Virtual Actors, activations and placements of actors and how these are exactly the things I've thought about over the years…

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... is a later paper that is much closer to what got open-sourced.

Re: .NET Orleans

#43

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places, but I'm having a surprisingly hard time finding hardware requirements.

I love that with Erlang I can throw an experimental app on Digital Ocean for just $5/mo and see if it gets traction. How much more resource intensive is Orleans and what kind of resource usage should I expect as I scale up the number of actors?

Re: .NET Orleans

#44
post #38
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…

Academically (And, to some extent, practically speaking) Orleans Virtual actors aren't the same as Erlang (or Akka) actors. Major differences: - Normal actors are pretty flexible, can work in local or remote contexts. Orleans is probably best described as Sharded Actors, It's a 'guided' implementation of Actors compared to Erlang or Akka where you are given a toolkit and have to build out what you intend to do. - Orl…

> - Orleans doesn't have any ordering guarantees. While this is not a firm requirement of the Actor model itself, both Erlang and Akka guarantee ordering between a given Sender-receiver pair (i.e. messages sent from A to C will be sent in order)

I thought Erlang only guaranteed that if the processes are on the same node. Is that not correct?

Re: .NET Orleans

#45

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

Why is it called orleans?

Re: .NET Orleans

#46

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

Totally off-topic, sorry: How did that name come about?

Re: .NET Orleans

#47
post #9

How does it compare to Akka?

Orleans and Akka guys did a comparison https://github.com/akka/akka-meta/blob/master/ComparisonWith...

That document is outdated and was written with an Akka-centric view. The author from Akka's side of things, Roland Kuhn, has since moved on to Actyx, from what I can tell.

The doc predates ACID transactions support in Orleans, but it talks about the Virtual Actor model vs the Akka model in general.

Re: .NET Orleans

#49

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

Totally off-topic, sorry: How did that name come about?

Microsoft Research has a tradition of naming projects after cities. Eg, if you type "microsoft research project" into Google (Bing appears to work better for this) and let it autocomplete, you can see some other projects which appear to be named after places: malmo, athens, tokyo, and others.

Re: .NET Orleans

#50

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

Why is it called orleans?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24692746
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