Orleans builds on the developer productivity of .NET and brings it to the world of distributed applications, such as cloud services. Orleans scales from a single on-premises server to globally distributed, highly-available applications in the cloud. Orleans takes familiar concepts like objects, interfaces, async/await, and try/catch and extends them to multi-server environments. As such, it helps developers experienced with single-server applications transition to building resilient, scalable cloud services and other distributed applications. For this reason, Orleans has often been referred to as "Distributed .NET". 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. The core contribution of Orleans is its programming model which tames the complexity inherent to highly-parallel distributed systems without restricting capabilities or imposing onerous constraints.
Features
- Orleans provides a simple persistence model which ensures that state is available to a grain before requests are processed
- Streams do not need to be created or registered before a grain or client publishes to a stream or subscribes to a stream
- Timers are the non-durable counterpart to reminders and can be used for high-frequency events
- When a grain is activated in Orleans, the runtime decides which server (silo) to activate that grain on
- Grain interfaces in Orleans can be optionally versioned
- Orleans is designed to scale elastically
- Orleans runs anywhere that .NET Core or .NET Framework are supported
Project Samples
