Architecting & Launching
the Halo 4 Services
SRECON ‘15
Slide 2
Slide 2 text
Caitie McCaffrey!
Distributed Systems Engineer
@Caitie
CaitieM.com
Slide 3
Slide 3 text
No content
Slide 4
Slide 4 text
• Halo Services Overview
• Architectural Challenges
• Orleans Basics
• Tales From Production
Slide 5
Slide 5 text
No content
Slide 6
Slide 6 text
Presence
Statistics
Title Files
Cheat Detection
User Generated Content
Slide 7
Slide 7 text
No content
Slide 8
Slide 8 text
No content
Slide 9
Slide 9 text
No content
Slide 10
Slide 10 text
No content
Slide 11
Slide 11 text
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
Slide 12
Slide 12 text
$220 million in sales
!
1 million players online
Day One
Slide 13
Slide 13 text
$300 million in sales
!
4 million players
online
!
31.4 million hours
Week One
Slide 14
Slide 14 text
11.6 million players
!
1.5 billion games
!
270 million hours
Overall
Slide 15
Slide 15 text
Architectural
Challenges
Slide 16
Slide 16 text
Load Patterns
Load Patterns
Slide 17
Slide 17 text
Azure Worker
Roles
Azure Table
Azure Blob
Azure Service
Bus
Slide 18
Slide 18 text
Always Available
Slide 19
Slide 19 text
Low Latency &
High Concurrency
Slide 20
Slide 20 text
Stateless 3 Tier !
Architecture
Slide 21
Slide 21 text
Latency Issues
Slide 22
Slide 22 text
Add A Cache
Slide 23
Slide 23 text
Concurrency
Issues
Slide 24
Slide 24 text
Data Locality
Slide 25
Slide 25 text
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)
Slide 26
Slide 26 text
Send A Message
Create a New Actor
Change Internal
Slide 27
Slide 27 text
State-full
Services
Slide 28
Slide 28 text
Philip A. Bernstein, Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, Gabriel
Kliot, Jorgen Thelin
Orleans: Distributed Virtual
Actors for Programmability
and Scalability
eXtreme Computing Group MSR
Slide 29
Slide 29 text
“Orleans is a runtime and
programming model for
building distributed systems,
based on the actor model”
Slide 30
Slide 30 text
Virtual Actors
“An Orleans actor always exists,
virtually. It cannot be explicitly
created or destroyed”
Slide 31
Slide 31 text
Virtual Actors
• Perpetual Existence
• Automatic Instantiation
• Location Transparency
• Automatic Scale out
Slide 32
Slide 32 text
Runtime
• Messaging
• Hosting
• Execution
Slide 33
Slide 33 text
Orleans Programming
Model
Slide 34
Slide 34 text
Reliability
“Orleans manages all aspects of reliability
automatically”
Slide 35
Slide 35 text
TOO!
Slide 36
Slide 36 text
No content
Slide 37
Slide 37 text
TOO!
Slide 38
Slide 38 text
TOO!
Slide 39
Slide 39 text
Performance &
Scalability
Slide 40
Slide 40 text
“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”