Papers We Love SF - Orleans Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability & Scalability

Orleans is a runtime and programming model for building scalable distributed systems, based on the actor model. The Orleans programming model introduces the abstraction of Virtual Actors. Orleans allows applications to obtain high performance, reliability, and scalability. This technology was developed by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research and was a core component of the Azure Services that supported that powered Halo 4, the award winning video game.

Transcript

1. Orleans: Distributed Virtual
   Actors for Programmability
   and Scalability
   Papers We Love #12!
   San Francisco!
   February 19th 2015!
   

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2. Caitie McCaffrey!
   Distributed Systems Engineer
   @Caitie
   CaitieM.com
   

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3. Philip A. Bernstein, Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, Gabriel
   Kliot, Jorgen Thelin
   Orleans: Distributed Virtual
   Actors for Programmability
   and Scalability
   eXtreme Computing Group MSR
   

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5. Orleans: a Framework for Cloud Computing
   Orleans: Cloud Computing for Everyone
   Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for
   Programmability & Scalability
   November 30th 2010
   October 2011
   March 2014
   

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6. The Actor Model
   A framework & basis for reasoning about concurrency
   A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence !
   Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, Richard Steiger (1973)
   

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7. Actor Actions
   • Send a Message
   • Create New Actors
   • Designate the Behavior to be used on
   the next Message
   

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8. Orleans
   “Orleans is a runtime and
   programming model for
   building distributed systems,
   based on the actor model”
   

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9. Virtual Actors
   “An Orleans actor always exists, virtually. It
   cannot be explicitly created or destroyed”
   

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10. Virtual Actors
    • Perpetual Existence
    • Automatic Instantiation
    • Location Transparency
    • Automatic Scale out
    

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11. Runtime
    • Messaging
    • Hosting
    • Execution
    

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12. Programming Model
    • .NET Framework!
    • Actor Interfaces!
    • Promises!
    • Actor References
    • Turns
    • Persistence
    

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14. Programming Model
    • .NET Framework
    • Actor Interfaces
    • Promises
    • Actor References!
    • Turns
    • Persistence
    

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16. Programming Model
    • .NET Framework
    • Actor Interfaces
    • Promises
    • Actor References
    • Turns!
    • Persistence
    

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18. Reliability
    “Orleans manages all aspects of reliability automatically”
    

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19. TOO!
    

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21. TOO!
    

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22. TOO!
    

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23. Isolation
    

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24. Messaging
    Guarantees
    

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25. Let’s Talk About CAP
    

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26. Orleans is AP
    

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27. Halo 4: Statistics
    Service
    

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29. Halo 4: Presence
    Service
    

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31. Performance &
    Scalability
    

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32. “Orleans applications run at very high CPU
    Utilization. We have run load tests with full
    saturation of 25 servers for many days at 90%+
    CPU utilization without any instability”
    

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35. Conclusion
    • Virtual Actors
    • AP Actor Activation
    • Developer Productivity
    

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36. Get Orleans
    https://github.com/dotnet/orleans!
    

    

    

    

    

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37. Discussion
    

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