Book Image

Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans

By : Bhupesh Guptha Muthiyalu, Suneel Kumar Kunani
Book Image

Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans

By: Bhupesh Guptha Muthiyalu, Suneel Kumar Kunani

Overview of this book

Building distributed applications in this modern era can be a tedious task as customers expect high availability, high performance, and improved resilience. With the help of this book, you'll discover how you can harness the power of Microsoft Orleans to build impressive distributed applications. Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans will demonstrate how to leverage Orleans to build highly scalable distributed applications step by step in the least possible time and with minimum effort. You'll explore some of the key concepts of Microsoft Orleans, including the Orleans programming model, runtime, virtual actors, hosting, and deployment. As you advance, you'll become well-versed with important Orleans assets such as grains, silos, timers, and persistence. Throughout the book, you'll create a distributed application by adding key components to the application as you progress through each chapter and explore them in detail. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the confidence and skills required to build distributed applications using Microsoft Orleans and deploy them in Microsoft Azure.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Distributed Applications Architecture
4
Section 2 - Working with Microsoft Orleans
10
Section 3 - Building Patterns in Orleans
13
Section 4 - Hosting and Deploying Orleans Applications to Azure

The origin of Microsoft Orleans

Though the actor model helps in building distributed applications, there is a steep learning curve. The eXtreme Computing Group of Microsoft Research published a white paper (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/orleans-virtual-actors/) on the actor model in 2010. The primary focus of this white paper is to simplify distributed computing and allow non-experts to write efficient, scalable, and reliable distributed systems. Microsoft Orleans is a runtime and framework built based on the white paper. In Orleans, the actor is termed a grain. The life cycle of a grain is managed by Orleans. Orleans actors are virtually always present. We just get the reference to the grain activation to interact with. In the case of other actor implementations, the developer has to handle the creation of the actor, placement, and recovery from failures. Orleans makes it simple to build distributed applications by abstracting all the complexity. The developer can...