Papers We Love DC #1 => Caitie McCaffrey on Orleans

[mrb]

. @CaitieM20

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/210931/Orleans-MSR-TR-2014-41.pdf

Description

High-scale interactive services demand high throughput with low latency and high availability, difficult goals to meet with the traditional stateless 3-tier architecture. The actor model makes it natural to build a stateful middle tier and achieve the required performance. However, the popular actor model platforms still pass many distributed systems problems to the developers.

The Orleans programming model introduces the novel abstraction of virtual actors that solves a number of the complex distributed systems problems, such as reliability and distributed resource management, liberat- ing the developers from dealing with those concerns. At the same time, the Orleans runtime enables applications to attain high performance, reliability and scalability.

This paper presents the design principles behind Orleans and demonstrates how Orleans achieves a simple programming model that meets these goals. We describe how Orleans simplified the development of several scalable production applications on Windows Azure, and report on the performance of those production systems.

Bio

Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat, Distributed Systems Diva, and Tech Lover. She is currently a Software Engineer at HBO, and prior to that worked at 343 Industries. Her focus is on Web Services, Distributed Systems, and Big Data. She is passionate about creating fun, social, and collaborative entertainment experiences. Caitie has a degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has worked on several video games including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, and most recently Halo 4. She currently is working at HBO on the HBO Go services. She maintains a blog at CaitieM.com and frequently discusses technology and entertainment on Twitter @CaitieM20