19balazs86 / playingwithorleans

Try out Microsoft Orleans as an Actor Model

Playing with Microsoft Orleans

In this repository, I have started an experimentation with Orleans as an Actor Model.

I tested the following features - Microsoft Orleans documentation 📚

• Persistence
• Reminder
• Startup tasks
• Transactions - Reentrancy or Interleaving for the AccountGrain, Stateless worker for the MoneyTransferGrain
• Observers
• Streaming
• Unit testing
• Dashboard 👤OrleansContrib

Resources

• Code sample browser 📚MS-Learn
• SignalR.Orleans 👤OrleansContrib
• Articles, videos and samples 📓Awesome Software Architecture
• Introduction to Actor-based development with Orleans 📽️1hour - Chris Klug - NDC Oslo 2023
• Orleans support in Aspire 📚MS-DevBlog | Voting sample app 📚MS-Learn

Personal Note

• All in all, I have mixed feelings about Orleans. I believe it is well-suited for games and other scenarios where Actors/Grains can participate as business logic.
• The architecture provides an efficient way of scaling the computation power by adding more Servers -> Silos -> Grains.
• No need to worry about database persistence and caching since Orleans handles it out of the box.
• However, I am not entirely convinced about the use of Reminder and Streams. While they are nice to have, I would prefer to use the official packages for Azure ServiceBus or Amazon SQS.