I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: 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.
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!
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and I want to give streams a second chance on a personal project, but I'm concerned that both Orleans and SF RA will be superseded by SF Mesh - do you have any thoughts on this?
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.)
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)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I gave a talk recently on how we use it at Microsoft: 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.