Orleans is a cross-platform software framework for building scalable and robust distributed interactive applications based on the .NET FrameworkMicrosoft's Orleans Distributed App Framework Is Now Cross Platform - The New StackOpen-Source Cloud Framework By Microsoft - HPC ASIA or on the more recent .NET.
Overview Orleans was originally created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research and introduced the virtual actor model as a new approach to building distributed systems for the cloud. Orleans scales from a single on-premises server to highly-available and globally distributed applications in the cloud.Microsoft to release Project Orleans as open source | Computerworld
The virtual actor model is based on the actor model but has several differences:
A virtual actor always exists, it cannot be explicitly created or destroyed. Virtual actors are automatically instantiated. If a server hosting an actor crashes, the next message sent to the actor causes it to be reinstantiated automatically. The server that an actor is on is transparent to the application code. Orleans can automatically create multiple instances of the same stateless actor.
Starting with cloud services for the Halo franchise, the framework has been used by a number of cloud services at MicrosoftOrleans at Microsoft | .NET Conf 2020 and other companies since 2011.Microsoft opens early adopter program for its 'Orleans' cloud framework | ZDNet The core Orleans technology was transferred to 343 Industries and is available as open source since January 2015.Microsoft to make Halo 4 gaming cloud engine Project Orleans open source - SiliconANGLE The source code is licensed under MIT License and hosted on GitHub.
Orleans runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS and is compatible with .NET Standard 2.0 and above.
Features Some Orleans features include: Persistence Distributed ACID transactionsResurrecting Middle-Tier Distributed Transactions | Microsoft ResearchDistributed Transactions are dead, long live distributed transactions! | Reactive Summit 2018 Streams Timers & Reminders Fault tolerance
Related implementations The Electronic Arts BioWare division created Project Orbit. It is a Java implementation of virtual actors that was heavily inspired by the Orleans project.Gamasutra: Creating scalable backends for games using open source Orleans framework
See also
Distributed computing
References
Further reading
External links
GitHub - dotnet/orleans: Orleans is a cross-platform framework for building distributed applications with .NET Orleans - Virtual Actors - Microsoft Research Microsoft Orleans - a worked example - CodeProject