Back to the future — building effective cloud services using Orleans

The explosive growth of web applications and services market since late 90s made the stateless architecture a de facto standard for developing such systems. Its scalability ease was achieved at a high cost: by increasing the load on data warehouses and abandoning the principles of object-oriented programming. The shortcomings of stateless model became evident with the growth of interactive applications with high data demand and low latency.

The Orleans framework created at Microsoft Research has implemented a radically new approach to system building, that gives developers the stateful architecture effectiveness and a host of other important benefits through a simple and intuitive programming model. Orleans is successfully used in blockbuster games like Halo, Gears of War, and Age of Empires, within Skype, Azure, and a number of other Microsoft products, as well as for IoT, financial modeling, and many other domains. Orleans clones, created for JVM, Go and Erlang, are additional evidence of the success of Orleans.