Microsoft's 'Orleans' cloud programming model gets a Halo test drive
Whenever anyone from Microsoft describes a Microsoft Research
project, there's almost always a disclaimer -- specifically, "There's no
guarantee when and if this technology will ever see the commercial
light of day."
Given that caveat, it's interesting when a Microsoft Research project
takes a step forward. Recently, that seems to have happened with
"Orleans," a cloud-programming model I last blogged about back in 2010.
When perusing the end-of-year research roundups, I found this
interesting tidbit buried in the eXtreme Computing Group's list of
accomplishments for 2012: "The cloud-systems team celebrated a year of successful
deployment of its distributed cloud technology—Orleans—in production for
Microsoft’s Halo team, and the team has scaled its system very
significantly since then."
That's one pretty impressive proof-of-concept demo.
Orleans, as Microsoft officials themselves have described it, "offers
a simple programming model build around grains, a unit of computation
with private and shared state that communicates exclusively by sending
messages to other grains and receiving and replying to requests from
clients. Combined with the Orleans runtime, which provides functionality
commonly used in this type of system, Orleans raises the level of
abstraction and helps developers build scalable correct Cloud
applications."
The (non-fiscal) Cliff Notes version: On the run-time front, Orleans
is to Windows Azure approximately as the Common Language Runtime (CLR)
is to Windows.
As the Microsoft researchers note on their page about Orleans: "Orleans provides direct support for the .NET programming model. We use standard .NET languages with custom attributes (currently C# is supported; we are working on F#)."
Summary:
Remember Microsoft Research's Orleans cloud-programming project? The
Halo team at Microsoft does.There's still no word as to when or how the eXtreme Computing Group
will bring Orleans to market. Will it be internally used infrastructure
only? Or will it be made available to any/all Windows Azure customers
at some point? Stay tuned....
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