Project "Orleans" is an Actor Model framework from Microsoft Research that is currently in public preview. It is designed to make it easy for .NET developers to develop and deploy an actor-based distributed system into Microsoft Azure.
Distributed sagas a protocol for coordinating microservicesJ On The Beach
Microservices have become the defacto architecture pattern for building services. However separating business logic into small services that operate with a single logical data set has introduced consistency challenges. Previous attempts to solve this problem like two phase commit have not been widely adopted due to availability and liveness issues.
Instead developers implement feral concurrency control mechanism. This technique can be error prone, and often results in “Death Star” architectures which rely on chained calls to enforce application invariants. These architectures become more complicated over time, and are difficult to modify and extend, and often don't correctly handle all failure scenarios.
In this talk I propose a new solution for this problem, Distributed Sagas, a protocol for coordinating requests among multiple micro services, while ensuring application invariants.
Project "Orleans" is an Actor Model framework from Microsoft Research that is currently in public preview. It is designed to make it easy for .NET developers to develop and deploy an actor-based distributed system into Microsoft Azure.
Distributed sagas a protocol for coordinating microservicesJ On The Beach
Microservices have become the defacto architecture pattern for building services. However separating business logic into small services that operate with a single logical data set has introduced consistency challenges. Previous attempts to solve this problem like two phase commit have not been widely adopted due to availability and liveness issues.
Instead developers implement feral concurrency control mechanism. This technique can be error prone, and often results in “Death Star” architectures which rely on chained calls to enforce application invariants. These architectures become more complicated over time, and are difficult to modify and extend, and often don't correctly handle all failure scenarios.
In this talk I propose a new solution for this problem, Distributed Sagas, a protocol for coordinating requests among multiple micro services, while ensuring application invariants.
NATS & Docker Meetup in Toronto - August 2016
Implementing Microservices with NATS, Diogo Monteiro
-How Aytra uses NATS
-Benefits of using NATS for inter service communication
-Lessons learned adopting NATS
-Overview of Houston NATS library
-Demo of Aytra
You can learn more about NATS at http://www.nats.io
Protecting your data at rest with Apache Kafka by Confluent and Vormetricconfluent
Learn how data in motion is secure within Apache Kafka and the broader Confluent Platform, while data at rest can be secured by solutions like Vormetric Data Security Manager.
ASP.NET Core is a significant redesign of ASP.NET. This topic introduces the new concepts in ASP.NET Core and explains how they help you develop modern web apps.
Building an enterprise level single sign-on application with the help of keycloak (Open Source Identity and Access Management).
And understanding the way to secure your application; frontend & backend API’s. Managing user federation with minimum configuration.
Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/28XnVtb.
Felix Klock describe the core concepts of the Rust language (ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes), as well as the tools beyond the compiler for open source software component distribution (cargo, crates.io). Filmed at qconlondon.com.
Felix Klock is a research engineer at Mozilla, where he works on the Rust compiler, runtime libraries, and language design. He previously worked on the ActionScript Virtual Machine for the Adobe Flash runtime. Klock is one of the developers of the Larceny Scheme language runtime.
Rust is a multi-paradigm systems programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance.
This talk covers the following: principles of design, features, and applications. There are many successful projects used Rust, including browsers, operation systems, and database management systems, which will be also discussed in the talk.
This is the slide deck from the popular "Introduction to Node.js" webinar with AMD and DevelopIntelligence, presented by Joshua McNeese. Watch our AMD Developer Central YouTube channel for the replay at https://www.youtube.com/user/AMDDevCentral.
Handling eventual consistency in a transactional world with Matteo Cimini and...HostedbyConfluent
Change data capture (CDC) is a widely used solution to offload data in real time from legacy systems to Kafka in order to make it available to all the other downstream consumer applications. Despite other solutions CDC can in fact guarantee at the same time low latency and a very small footprint on the source system. However when data is moved from a relational database to a distributed stream platform what is gained in terms of throughput and latency is lost in terms of strong consistency and not all consumers are able to manage this loss by themselves. There are different upstream solutions that can be implemented to mitigate this problem preserving different levels of consistency.
In this talk we’ll:
- see what is eventual consistency and where strong consistency is lost while moving data from a database to Kafka
- describe different solutions to preserve consistency working at the source level (i.e. outbox pattern and call back pattern), working on Kafka topology or working on an external storage (i.e. integration hub)
- analyze the pros and cons of all the presented solutions in terms of consistency guarantees and latency loss
Async/await and the Task model are the main features of C# 5/.NET 4.5. While asynchronous programming can be done in most languages, all have different specifics, usage and trade-offs. You will see, in this presentation, what is the asynchronous Task model in .NET and why it matters for web apps.
Over the past few years, web-applications have started to play an increasingly important role in our lives. We expect them to be always available and the data to be always fresh. This shift into the realm of real-time data processing is now transitioning to physical devices, and Gartner predicts that the Internet of Things will grow to an installed base of 26 billion units by 2020.
Reactive web-applications are an answer to the new requirements of high-availability and resource efficiency brought by this rapid evolution. On the JVM, a set of new languages and tools has emerged that enable the development of entirely asynchronous request and data handling pipelines. At the same time, container-less application frameworks are gaining increasing popularity over traditional deployment mechanisms.
This talk is going to give you an introduction into one of the most trending reactive web-application stack on the JVM, involving the Scala programming language, the concurrency toolkit Akka and the web-application framework Play. It will show you how functional programming techniques enable asynchronous programming, and how those technologies help to build robust and resilient web-applications.
NATS & Docker Meetup in Toronto - August 2016
Implementing Microservices with NATS, Diogo Monteiro
-How Aytra uses NATS
-Benefits of using NATS for inter service communication
-Lessons learned adopting NATS
-Overview of Houston NATS library
-Demo of Aytra
You can learn more about NATS at http://www.nats.io
Protecting your data at rest with Apache Kafka by Confluent and Vormetricconfluent
Learn how data in motion is secure within Apache Kafka and the broader Confluent Platform, while data at rest can be secured by solutions like Vormetric Data Security Manager.
ASP.NET Core is a significant redesign of ASP.NET. This topic introduces the new concepts in ASP.NET Core and explains how they help you develop modern web apps.
Building an enterprise level single sign-on application with the help of keycloak (Open Source Identity and Access Management).
And understanding the way to secure your application; frontend & backend API’s. Managing user federation with minimum configuration.
Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at URL http://bit.ly/28XnVtb.
Felix Klock describe the core concepts of the Rust language (ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes), as well as the tools beyond the compiler for open source software component distribution (cargo, crates.io). Filmed at qconlondon.com.
Felix Klock is a research engineer at Mozilla, where he works on the Rust compiler, runtime libraries, and language design. He previously worked on the ActionScript Virtual Machine for the Adobe Flash runtime. Klock is one of the developers of the Larceny Scheme language runtime.
Rust is a multi-paradigm systems programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance.
This talk covers the following: principles of design, features, and applications. There are many successful projects used Rust, including browsers, operation systems, and database management systems, which will be also discussed in the talk.
This is the slide deck from the popular "Introduction to Node.js" webinar with AMD and DevelopIntelligence, presented by Joshua McNeese. Watch our AMD Developer Central YouTube channel for the replay at https://www.youtube.com/user/AMDDevCentral.
Handling eventual consistency in a transactional world with Matteo Cimini and...HostedbyConfluent
Change data capture (CDC) is a widely used solution to offload data in real time from legacy systems to Kafka in order to make it available to all the other downstream consumer applications. Despite other solutions CDC can in fact guarantee at the same time low latency and a very small footprint on the source system. However when data is moved from a relational database to a distributed stream platform what is gained in terms of throughput and latency is lost in terms of strong consistency and not all consumers are able to manage this loss by themselves. There are different upstream solutions that can be implemented to mitigate this problem preserving different levels of consistency.
In this talk we’ll:
- see what is eventual consistency and where strong consistency is lost while moving data from a database to Kafka
- describe different solutions to preserve consistency working at the source level (i.e. outbox pattern and call back pattern), working on Kafka topology or working on an external storage (i.e. integration hub)
- analyze the pros and cons of all the presented solutions in terms of consistency guarantees and latency loss
Async/await and the Task model are the main features of C# 5/.NET 4.5. While asynchronous programming can be done in most languages, all have different specifics, usage and trade-offs. You will see, in this presentation, what is the asynchronous Task model in .NET and why it matters for web apps.
Over the past few years, web-applications have started to play an increasingly important role in our lives. We expect them to be always available and the data to be always fresh. This shift into the realm of real-time data processing is now transitioning to physical devices, and Gartner predicts that the Internet of Things will grow to an installed base of 26 billion units by 2020.
Reactive web-applications are an answer to the new requirements of high-availability and resource efficiency brought by this rapid evolution. On the JVM, a set of new languages and tools has emerged that enable the development of entirely asynchronous request and data handling pipelines. At the same time, container-less application frameworks are gaining increasing popularity over traditional deployment mechanisms.
This talk is going to give you an introduction into one of the most trending reactive web-application stack on the JVM, involving the Scala programming language, the concurrency toolkit Akka and the web-application framework Play. It will show you how functional programming techniques enable asynchronous programming, and how those technologies help to build robust and resilient web-applications.
Multi-threading in the modern era: Vertx Akka and QuasarGal Marder
Everybody wants scalable systems. However, writing non-blocking applications in Java is not an easy task. In this session, we'll go over 3 different frameworks for managing multi-treading and concurrency support (Akka, Vertx and Quasar).
Scalable systems make us face challenges like concurrency, distribution, fault tolerance, elasticity, etc. Akka not only steps up to meet these, but it makes writing scalable software particularly easy. We will demo Akka's most important tool, the actor model, using a vivid example and live coding.
Go Reactive: Event-Driven, Scalable, Resilient & Responsive SystemsJonas Bonér
The demands and expectations for applications have changed dramatically in recent years. Applications today are deployed on a wide range of infrastructure; from mobile devices up to thousands of nodes running in the cloud—all powered by multi-core processors. They need to be rich and collaborative, have a real-time feel with millisecond response time and should never stop running. Additionally, modern applications are a mashup of external services that need to be consumed and composed to provide the features at hand.
We are seeing a new type of applications emerging to address these new challenges—these are being called Reactive Applications. In this talk we will discuss four key traits of Reactive; Event-Driven, Scalable, Resilient and Responsive—how they impact application design, how they interact, their supporting technologies and techniques, how to think when designing and building them—all to make it easier for you and your team to Go Reactive.
New abstractions for concurrency make writing programs easier by moving away from threads and locks, but debugging such programs becomes harder. The call-stack, an essential tool in understanding why and how control flow reached a certain point in the program, loses meaning when inspected in traditional debuggers. Futures, actors or iteratees make code easier to write and reason about, and in this talk I'll show a simple solution to make them easier to debug. The tool I present integrates well with the Eclipse plugin for Scala, and shows how a "reactive debugger" might look like.
Many people teach design patterns as a fundamental step to Object Oriented Programming. They are so universally seen as important that almost every single programming conference that I have been to has had at least one talk about them. They are quite often used as interview questions to test a candidate's OOP knowledge. However, just like inheritance, they are not needed for OOP. And just like inheritance, they are a distraction rather than a foundation. Instead of focusing on patterns, I suggest focusing on learning about abstraction and communication. Why? Come and find out!
Talk at #PHPNW14
Un actor (model) per amico - Alessandro Melchiori - Codemotion Milan 2016Codemotion
Erlang, Elixir, Scala con Akka, solo per fare gli esempi piu' famosi, sono implementazioni di un modello matematico, formulato nel 1973, ma del tutto attuale: l'Actor Model. Utilizzato per sviluppare soluzioni "concorrenti e distribuite", il concetto di "attore" si sposa alla perfezione con il mondo del "cloud". In questa sessione, dopo una breve introduzione teorica sull'Actor Model, analizzeremo le possibilità messe a disposizione dell'ecosistema .net
Progscon 2017: Taming the wild fronteer - Adventures in ClojurescriptJohn Stevenson
Progscon 2017 conference talk, introducing Clojurescript for a functional programming approach to building React.js apps.
Examples include using React.js directly and the Om Clojurescript library that closely follows the React.js API. Also cover a simpler approach to React with the Clojurescript libraries called Reagent and Rum.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
Let's dive deeper into the world of ODC! Ricardo Alves (OutSystems) will join us to tell all about the new Data Fabric. After that, Sezen de Bruijn (OutSystems) will get into the details on how to best design a sturdy architecture within ODC.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
5. The Model of Actor Model
A way of reasoning about concurrent computation
6. What is the Actor Model
A way of reasoning about concurrent computation
Is inherently concurrent
7. The Model of Actor Model
Is a conceptual model for reasoning about concurrent
computation
Is inherently concurrent
Manages concurrency through message passing
8. The Model of Actor Model
Is a conceptual model for reasoning about concurrent
computation
Adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor
Is inherently concurrent
Manages concurrency through message passing
9. What is an Actor?
Lightweight
Never shares state
Communicates through asynchronous
messages
Has a mailbox to buffer messages
Processes one message at a time
Is a single-thread object
12. The overview
Akka.NET
• A port of Java/Scala Akka
• Open source
• Task Parallel Library
• Reactive methodology
• Can be run within an application,
on-prem or in the cloud(?)
13. The overview
Orleans
• Started by Microsoft Research
• Open source
• Task Parallel Library
• Reactive methodology
• Cloud-native
Akka.NET
• A port of Java/Scala Akka
• Open source
• Task Parallel Library
• Reactive methodology
• Can be run within an application, on-
prem or in the cloud(?)
23. Akka.NET: An Actor is Actor
Must be explicitly created and stopped
Are created in the context of their parent
24. Akka.NET: An Actor is Actor
Must be explicitly created and stopped
Are created in the context of their parent
Exposes a set of life-cycle hooks
25. Akka.NET: An Actor is Actor
Must be explicitly created and stopped
Are created in the context of their parent
Exposes a set of life-cycle hooks
Are location transparent
akka.tcp://Demo@127.0.0.1:12345/user/HelloWorld/$c
28. Orleans – creating a grain
• In Visual Studio create two projects
• One for your grain interfaces
• One for your grain implementations
• In both projects install the NuGet package
Microsoft.Orleans.OrleansCodeGenerator.build
29. Create a Grain interface
public interface IHelloWorld : IGrainWithIntegerKey
{
Task Greeting(string name);
Task<string> ReturnGreeting(string name);
}
Must implement one of the
following:
• IGrainWithIntegerKey
• IGrainWithGuidKey
• IGrainWithStringKey
• IGrainWithIntegerCompoundKey
• IGrainWithGuidCompoundKey
30. Create an implementation of the interface
public class HelloWorldGrain : Grain, IHelloWorld
{
public Task Greeting(string name)
{
Console.WriteLine($"Hi {name} from Orleans");
return TaskDone.Done;
}
public Task<string> ReturnGreeting(string name)
{
return Task.FromResult($"Hi {name} from Orleans");
}
}
31. Interacting with Grains
static async Task SendMessage(User user )
{
var helloWorld = GrainClient.GrainFactory.GetGrain<IHelloWorld>(0);
var response = await helloWorld.Greeting(user);
WriteLine(response);
}
33. Akka.Net – creating an actor
• In Visual Studio:
• Create a new class library
• Create a console application
• Import the core Akka.NET Nuget package: Akka
34. Create message
public class HelloUserMessage
{
public User User { get; }
public HelloUserMessage(User user)
{
User = user;
}
}
35. Create an actor
public class HelloWorldActor : ReceiveActor
{
private TimeSpan _waitPeriod;
public HelloWorldActor(TimeSpan waitPeriod)
{
_waitPeriod = waitPeriod;
Receive<HelloUserMessage>(m =>
{
var user = m.User;
Thread.Sleep(_waitPeriod);
WriteLine($"Hi {user.Id} {user.FirstName} nice to meet you [on thread ");
});
Receive<DataCompleted>(m => WriteLine("Data is completed"));
}
36. Using the actor
var system = ActorSystem.Create("demo")
var helloWorld = system.ActorOf(Props.Create(() => new HelloWorldActor()));
helloWorld.Tell(new HelloUserMessage(new User());
await system.Terminate();
42. Bits and Pieces
“let it crash” and exception handling
Persisting state
Changing behaviour
Grains for everyone
Routing in Akka.NET
Clustering in Akka.NET
Why has the actor model appeared to suddenly become the flavour of the month?
Because multi-threaded concurrency is hard and distributed multi-threaded concurrency is harder again.
Shared state
Race conditions
lock and deadlocks
hard to understand and maintain
not easily distributed.
In the .NET ecosystem the three best known frameworks that in one form or another implement the actor model are service fabric, akka.net and Microsoft Orleans. It is these last two that we are looking at today.
In this talk we really only to skim the surface of either of these frame works
First proposed by Hewitt, Bishop and Steiger in 1973 as a mathematical theory of computation.
Another key feature of the actor model is the concept of distribution. Given an actor is a single unit of code with a mailbox and an internal state, whether that actor running locally or on a remote node is irrelevant to the sender. As long as the message gets there what does it matter?
An Actor is a primitive unit of computation
<click slides>
In addition to characteristics an actor
Can create other actors
Can send messages to other actors
Can change its behaviour to determine what to do with the next message
Another key feature of the actor model is the concept of distribution. Given an actor is a single unit of code with a mailbox and an internal state, whether that actor running locally or on a remote node is irrelevant to the sender. As long as the message gets there what does it matter?
“One actor is no actor, they come in systems, and they have to have addresses so that one actor can send messages to another actor.”
– Carl Hewitt
Having got the preliminaries out of the way time to dig into Orleans and Akka.net
And have a look at how they both compare with each other and how they have approached implementing the Actor Model.
So as you can see there is at least on the surface some similarities but in many ways that is where it ends.
To paraphrase from Dr. Roland Kuhn's article comparing Orleans and Akka actors;
with Orleans the primary focus is to simplify distributed computing so that non-experts can write efficient, scalable and reliable distributed services.
Akka on the other hand is toolkit for creating distributed systems offering full control over the domain but also exposing its inherent complexity.
In other words Orleans provides a relatively low entry point into the actor model paradigm for developers from an OO background whereas Akka.net requires you rethink your approach to programing.
Akka uses a supervisor hierarchy
Silos are more like a commune where actors exist as independent think of it like a bucket of actors
an actor is a logical unit of computation and in terms of the key characteristics that make up an actor, lightweight, single threaded, no shared state, etc. Orleans and Akka.NET are pretty much on par but after that their respective implementations are radically diverge reflecting the differences in their design philosophy.
In Orleans what we have been referring to as an actor is Grain. This difference in terminology reflects the difference in how The Developers of Orleans have approached the problem.
A grain is also referred to as a virtual actor as it may or not exist it any point in time.
Within Orleans if a grain has been idle for a period of time it will be garbage collected to free up memory. In terms of lifecycle grains are either activated or deactivated, They can never be programmatically started or stopped.
Such as:
PreStart
PostStop
PreRestart
PostRestart
In Akka.NET Actors explicitly communicate via messages. And by convention should be immutable (though this is currently not enforced)
In Orleans the existence of a message is not so obvious and I have to admit this bothers me a little.
When a grain method is invoked, the Orleans runtime makes a deep copy of the method arguments and forms the request out of the copies. This protects against the calling code modifying the argument objects before the data is passed to the called grain.
The Orleans.Concurrency.Immutable wrapper class