NEW YORK: Microsoft is all set to release as open source that helps developers of cloud services.
Building cloud services for millions of users means connecting and coordinating thousands of servers, and handling tasks and information across all of them. Project Orleans is a framework built by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research using .NET, designed so developers who aren’t distributed systems experts can build cloud services that scale to cope with high demand and still keep high performance.
The Orleans framework was used to build several services on Azure, including services that are part of Halo 4, and Microsoft had an enthusiastic response when it released a public preview of the technology in April this year. Now Sergey Bykov of the eXtreme Computing Group says they will open-source the project.
The code will be released under an MIT license and will be published on the GitHub site in early 2015 (instead of Microsoft’s own CodePlex open source site); they say that they plan to accept contributions to the code from users.
Orleans is designed for building cloud services like social graphs (the list of friends on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter), real-time analytics and interactive entertainment, and to work with large numbers of devices like smartphones or Internet of Things sensors. Halo 4 uses the framework for the presence service (which keeps track of all the game sessions, all the players and the status of each game) and the statistic service (which tracks details like when and where a shot was fired in a game and with which weapons, as well as the achievements and other personal information about players).
That information, displayed in the Halo Waypoint interface, is important to players, according to Hoop Somuah of the Halo Cloud Services Team at 343 Industries, who explained how Halo uses Orleans at Microsoft’s Build conference.
