BUILDING THE HALO 4 SERVICES WITH ORLEANS - Oredev 2014

Halo 4 is a first-person shooter on the Xbox 360, with fast-paced, competitive gameplay. To complement the code on disc a set of services were developed and deployed in Azure to store player statistics, display player presence information, deliver daily challenges, modify playlists, catch cheaters and more. These services needed to support high demand, with low latency, and high availability. In this session will discuss some of the challenges faced while building this services, and how Orleans, Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability, was utilized to solve these problems.

Orleans paper link: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/210931/Orleans-MSR-TR-2014-41.pdf

Transcript

1. Building the Halo 4 Services with Orleans Oredev 2014 @CaitieM20
2. Caitie McCaffrey Distributed Systems Engineer @CaitieM20 CaitieM.com
5. Halo:CE - 6.43 million Halo 2 - 8.49 million Halo 3 - 11.87 million Halo 3: ODST - 6.22 million Halo Reach - 9.52 million
6. Presence Statistics Title Files Cheat Detection User Generated Content
11. $220 million in sales ! 1 million players online Day One
12. $300 million in sales ! 4 million players online ! 31.4 million hours Week One
13. 11.6 million players ! 1.5 billion games ! 270 million hours Overall
14. Architectural Challenges
15. Load Patterns
16. Azure Worker Roles Azure Table Azure Blob Azure Service Bus
17. Latency & Concurrency
18. Stateless 3 Tier Architecture
19. Latency Issues
20. Add A Cache
21. Concurrency Issues
22. Data Locality
24. Actor Model A framework & basis for reasoning about concurrency A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence ! Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, Richard Steiger (1973)
25. Send A Message Create a New Actor Change Internal State
26. Orleans “Orleans is a runtime and programming model for building distributed systems, based on the actor model” eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research
27. Orleans Programming Model
28. • .NET Framework • Actor Interfaces • Promises • Actor References • Turns • Persistence
30. • .NET Framework • Actor Interfaces • Promises • Actor References • Turns • Persistence
32. • .NET Framework • Actor Interfaces • Promises • Actor References • Turns • Persistence
34. Orleans is a Distributed Actor Runtime
35. Silos Provide ! Messaging ! Hosting ! Execution
36. Virtual Actors “An Orleans actor always exists, virtually. It cannot be explicitly created or destroyed.”
37. Virtual Actors Perpetual Existence Automatic Instantiation Location Transparency Automatic Scale Out
38. Reliability & Fault Tolerance “Orleans manages all aspects of reliability automatically”
43. Orleans & Halo 4
44. Architecture
45. Halo 4 Statistics Service
46. Player Grain
47. Game Grain
50. CAP Theorem
51. Orleans is AP
52. Ensuring Correctness
53. At Least Once Messaging
54. Immutability & Idempotency ! Player Game ! Player Game ! Player Stats F( ! Player Game ! Player Game ! Player Game ) , , , ,
56. Handling Partitions
58. Performance & Scalability
59. “Orleans applications run at very high CPU Utilization. We have run load tests with full saturation … at 90%+ CPU utilization without any instability.”
63. Get Orleans ! 
 download & samples:! https://orleans.codeplex.com/
 
 

64. @CaitieM20 Questions?