Updated: November 21, 2022 (October 3, 2022)

  Analyst Report

Project Orleans Joins .NET

My Atlas / Analyst Reports

705 wordsTime to read: 4 min
Barry Briggs by
Barry Briggs

Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2020, Barry worked at Microsoft for 12 years in a variety of roles, including... more

  • Orleans, a developer framework supporting applications consisting of thousands or millions of cooperating distributed objects, is available in .NET.
  • Orleans can be used for real-time collaboration, IoT applications, and online gaming, and it underlies Microsoft Mesh, a metaverse application.
  • Orleans simplifies many hard problems of distributed systems, allowing developers to focus more on the application and less on the plumbing.

 

Project Orleans, an open source framework for distributed applications created by Microsoft Research, was incorporated into .NET in Feb. 2021. While Orleans can run on-premises, it is mostly used in Azure for massively scalable real-time applications such as collaborative applications, IoT, and gaming back ends.

High-Level Concepts

Orleans is an implementation of “actor model,” which is an architectural style supporting large numbers of (usually small) distributed objects. An object can represent a real-world entity such as a user or device, or a simple abstract entity such as a game. In Orleans parlance, a “grain” is an object class, such as “user”; a “grain instance” represents a particular instance, such as particular user. Typically, a grain is implemented as a single object in a .NET language, such as C#.

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