Orleans: An Object Framework for Cloud Computing From Microsoft Research

Posted by James Vastbinder on Dec 03, 2010

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

C# ,

F# ,

.NET Languages ,

.NET ,

Architecture ,

Programming ,

Cloud Computing ,

Orleans ,

Architecture Documentation

Share |

RELATED Research

Earlier this week Microsoft Research published a paper outlining a framework for Cloud Computing codenamed Orleans.  The framework is intended for cloud computing applications where a client such as a PC, smartphone or embedded device is employed.  In Orleans, the basic premise is to use concurrency patterns and lightweight transactions on an actor-like model with a declarative specification for persistence, replication and consistency.

a simple programming model built around grains, logical units of computation with private state that communicate exclusively by sending messages ….

The system as a whole can process multiple requests concurrently in distinct grain activations, but these computations are isolated, except at the clearly identified points where grains commit state changes to persistent storage and make them globally visible

Summary of Orleans Definitions:

• Grain – an atomic unit of isolation, distribution and durability.
• Activations –multiple instantiations of a grain which process multiple independent requests to a service in parallel.
• Grain Domain – a logical isolated workspace which delimits the set of grains it can directly access.  Hierarchical and nested in nature.
• Promises – asynchronous primitive that represents a promise to future completion.
• Turns – a grain activation operates in discrete units of work and finishes each unit before moving to the next unit.

The Microsoft Research team built Orleans as a cloud computing pattern meant to address the need for scale, multi-tenancy and both reliability and availability.  The intention is for the grain model to mimic at a programmatic level the sharded data stores they represent and their inherent capability of flexibility as the application changes over time.  Further, to address availability and reliability, the use of grains represented as computations or datums, provides failover capabilities built into the system while preserving consistency and separation of logic.

Orleans has three main components; a programming model or framework outlined in the publication, Orleans: A Framework for Cloud Computing, programming language and tool support and a runtime system.  Currently Orleans provides support for C# and they are actively working on F#.  The runtime delivers core cloud computing functionality such as persistence, replication, consistency and full life cycle management for versioning, debugging, deployment and monitoring.  The team has an informal discussion on Channel 9 which walks through the logical architecture.

This first look at Orlean’s internals is very instructional as to how to architect and build a cloud scale application as the software development world moves from Enterprise computing to Internet scale computing above the transport layer.  

RelatedVendorContent

Want to know how software releases can be stress-free and happen with one click? Try Go free!

Improving Software Delivery Cycles: Pre-requisites and Inhibitors

Automating Error Reporting for .NET Applications

Troubleshoot Java/.NET performance while getting full visibility in production

Visual Studio vNext: ALM features for Agile Planning, Team Collaboration

Related Sponsor

Go: Agile Release Management Solutions. Go enables predictable, defect-free and timely software releases.

1. Back to top

   A Big Progress on Ubicomp Development

   by Rochester Elliott

   The new idea, though somewhat originated from the melting pot of various invented theories, will take positive effects on new rounds of technology evolution. The work from Microsoft just highlighted the trends of development of computing patterns like Ubiquitous Computing that has been flourishing since last century.

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Grain is same as Clojure's agent!

   by 孙 奇辉

   and Promises same as Clojure's promise!

   Reply