4 ms·

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a

I'm a core developer on Orleans. Feel free to ask any questions here, or on gitter: https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhgYlvGLv9c - the talk is very short and so it does not go into many details, but it gives an overview of some internal use cases.

munchbunny 6y ago
Wow, amazing to see this after a whole decade! I worked on this as an intern way back when it was a nascent project in MSR. Going through the documentation, this is a complete trip. I see some of the original concepts are still intact, but the ergonomics are completely different now. Awesome!
giancarlostoro 6y ago
I mostly found out about Orleans through Joe Hegarty who worked on Orbit in Java (EA / BioWare) its been a while since I looked at both how closely would you say they are related to one another in terms of design today? What would you say are some of the key differences between the two? My understand at the time was they were closely related.
ryanjshaw 6y ago
I spent a fair amount of time doing a POC on Orleans but ultimately went with SF Reliable Actors due to some issues I couldn't resolve with a custom Streams implementation (Kafka subscriber/publisher). I really enjoyed the simplistic development model of Orleans compared to SF, and I want to give streams a second chance on a personal project, but I'm concerned that both Orleans and SF RA will be superseded by SF Mesh - do you have any thoughts on this?
- JoyrexJ9 6y ago
  SF Mesh is a project that's been long discontinued
- x0n 6y ago
  SF/RA is pretty much in maintenance mode. SF Mesh is dead. But Orleans 4.0 is going to make virtual streams custom data adapters easy to write (they say.)
  - Serow225 6y ago
    That's always been my concern when looking at Orleans. Why can't Microsoft just be up front about the status of these things, so that people don't pick them for greenfield projects? What are the actual "live" platforms for running Orleans? I don't want to deal with running clusters and nodes, the closer to 'serverless Orleans' the better for me (Functions Durable Entities etc is not the same thing)
    - reubenbond 6y ago
      I think if you look at the consistent development history, you can use that as an indicator. Internal teams host it on Kubernetes (Linux), Service Fabric (Windows), and other places. The "Orleans at Microsoft" talk from August covers where teams are hosting it and how they're using it: https://youtu.be/KhgYlvGLv9c https://youtu.be/KhgYlvGLv9c
sjansen 6y ago
Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places, but I'm having a surprisingly hard time finding hardware requirements. I love that with Erlang I can throw an experimental app on Digital Ocean for just $5/mo and see if it gets traction. How much more resource intensive is Orleans and what kind of resource usage should I expect as I scale up the number of actors?
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  You can run Orleans on a single host or many. In fact I believe we do have a host in production running Orleans by itself that is the equivalent of a $5/mo DO box. Resource usage scales with network activity in my experience. I think there are benchmarks around, but generally the scaling factor seems similar to conventional networking models.
  - joking 6y ago
    We have a pair of machines for resiliency, but on test and staging environments we run many times the services and experiments on one box with many other services without a problem, it maybe need a bit more memory for the .net virtual machine vs the erlang one, but totally doable with a basic machine.
- SergeyBykov 6y ago
  We've seen clusters running on a bunch of Raspberry Pis.
BolexNOLA 6y ago
Why is it called orleans?
- ix101 6y ago
  Possibly they preferred a city named "new "? Maybe they didn't like NET York..
- swyx 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24692746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24692746
woodpanel 6y ago
Totally off-topic, sorry: How did that name come about?
- reubenbond 6y ago
  Microsoft Research has a tradition of naming projects after cities. Eg, if you type "microsoft research project" into Google (Bing appears to work better for this) and let it autocomplete, you can see some other projects which appear to be named after places: malmo, athens, tokyo, and others.
  - hk__2 6y ago
    Then why Orleans and not <insert another city here>?
    - reubenbond 6y ago
      That's a good question. I wasn't around at the time the project was formed. At that time I was working on Microsoft's internal metrics system. Years later, I became involved as an external contributor (I had left MS) and eventually rejoined MS to work on Orleans full-time.
  - simlevesque 6y ago
    Monaco also
popinman322 6y ago
Are there any good resources on combining projects Orleans and Coyote? https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/ https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/
pugz 6y ago
Do you know if Sumeet has ever used Orleans? I'm going to need to see a Sumeetestimonial before I commit to a new framework.
ToFab123 6y ago
Is Orleans based on Service Fabric Actors?
- reubenbond 6y ago
  No, Service Fabric Reliable Actors are based on the Orleans API and model

munchbunny 6y ago

Wow, amazing to see this after a whole decade! I worked on this as an intern way back when it was a nascent project in MSR. Going through the documentation, this is a complete trip. I see some of the original concepts are still intact, but the ergonomics are completely different now. Awesome!

giancarlostoro 6y ago

I mostly found out about Orleans through Joe Hegarty who worked on Orbit in Java (EA / BioWare) its been a while since I looked at both how closely would you say they are related to one another in terms of design today? What would you say are some of the key differences between the two? My understand at the time was they were closely related.

ryanjshaw 6y ago

I spent a fair amount of time doing a POC on Orleans but ultimately went with SF Reliable Actors due to some issues I couldn't resolve with a custom Streams implementation (Kafka subscriber/publisher). I really enjoyed the simplistic development model of Orleans compared to SF, and I want to give streams a second chance on a personal project, but I'm concerned that both Orleans and SF RA will be superseded by SF Mesh - do you have any thoughts on this?

JoyrexJ9 6y ago
SF Mesh is a project that's been long discontinued
x0n 6y ago
SF/RA is pretty much in maintenance mode. SF Mesh is dead. But Orleans 4.0 is going to make virtual streams custom data adapters easy to write (they say.)
- Serow225 6y ago
  That's always been my concern when looking at Orleans. Why can't Microsoft just be up front about the status of these things, so that people don't pick them for greenfield projects? What are the actual "live" platforms for running Orleans? I don't want to deal with running clusters and nodes, the closer to 'serverless Orleans' the better for me (Functions Durable Entities etc is not the same thing)
  - reubenbond 6y ago
    I think if you look at the consistent development history, you can use that as an indicator. Internal teams host it on Kubernetes (Linux), Service Fabric (Windows), and other places. The "Orleans at Microsoft" talk from August covers where teams are hosting it and how they're using it: https://youtu.be/KhgYlvGLv9c https://youtu.be/KhgYlvGLv9c

sjansen 6y ago

Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places, but I'm having a surprisingly hard time finding hardware requirements. I love that with Erlang I can throw an experimental app on Digital Ocean for just $5/mo and see if it gets traction. How much more resource intensive is Orleans and what kind of resource usage should I expect as I scale up the number of actors?

lwansbrough 6y ago
You can run Orleans on a single host or many. In fact I believe we do have a host in production running Orleans by itself that is the equivalent of a $5/mo DO box. Resource usage scales with network activity in my experience. I think there are benchmarks around, but generally the scaling factor seems similar to conventional networking models.
- joking 6y ago
  We have a pair of machines for resiliency, but on test and staging environments we run many times the services and experiments on one box with many other services without a problem, it maybe need a bit more memory for the .net virtual machine vs the erlang one, but totally doable with a basic machine.
SergeyBykov 6y ago
We've seen clusters running on a bunch of Raspberry Pis.

BolexNOLA 6y ago

Why is it called orleans?

ix101 6y ago
Possibly they preferred a city named "new "? Maybe they didn't like NET York..
swyx 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24692746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24692746

woodpanel 6y ago

Totally off-topic, sorry: How did that name come about?

reubenbond 6y ago
Microsoft Research has a tradition of naming projects after cities. Eg, if you type "microsoft research project" into Google (Bing appears to work better for this) and let it autocomplete, you can see some other projects which appear to be named after places: malmo, athens, tokyo, and others.
- hk__2 6y ago
  Then why Orleans and not <insert another city here>?
  - reubenbond 6y ago
    That's a good question. I wasn't around at the time the project was formed. At that time I was working on Microsoft's internal metrics system. Years later, I became involved as an external contributor (I had left MS) and eventually rejoined MS to work on Orleans full-time.
- simlevesque 6y ago
  Monaco also

popinman322 6y ago

Are there any good resources on combining projects Orleans and Coyote? https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/ https://microsoft.github.io/coyote/

pugz 6y ago

Do you know if Sumeet has ever used Orleans? I'm going to need to see a Sumeetestimonial before I commit to a new framework.

ToFab123 6y ago

Is Orleans based on Service Fabric Actors?

reubenbond 6y ago
No, Service Fabric Reliable Actors are based on the Orleans API and model