The origin of Microsoft Orleans

Though the actor model helps in building distributed applications, there is a steep learning curve. The eXtreme Computing Group of Microsoft Research published a white paper (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/orleans-virtual-actors/) on the actor model in 2010. The primary focus of this white paper is to simplify distributed computing and allow non-experts to write efficient, scalable, and reliable distributed systems. Microsoft Orleans is a runtime and framework built based on the white paper. In Orleans, the actor is termed a grain. The life cycle of a grain is managed by Orleans. Orleans actors are virtually always present. We just get the reference to the grain activation to interact with. In the case of other actor implementations, the developer has to handle the creation of the actor, placement, and recovery from failures. Orleans makes it simple to build distributed applications by abstracting all the complexity. The developer can...