Cloud computing; what is it? The concept continually changes. I have been working in cloud development technologies for a number of years, creating systems that scale auto-magically across many servers such that an application has no real awareness of where data or code resides.
Microsoft has made this cloud computing even easier in the open source Azure project Orleans. Since the release of Azure, and the amazing blob capability provided in the platform, as well as on demand scaling up and out of software, they continue to deploy new tools exploiting the capabilities of the Azure platform.
How much time do we spend architecting and building an enterprise grade product? We spend a great deal of time establishing methods of communication, caching, persistence, and managing the lifetime of data. Orleans provides a framework to handle much of that work. We still create an object of something; but, we are not responsible for the instantiation, durability, persistence, or even the hosting of that object. Orleans handles it completely on our behalf.
Orleans turns the programming paradigm on its ear. No longer are we passing data/objects around to our code. In today’s world, the code is smaller than the data. Now we pass the code to Orleans allowing it to distribute and exercise your code close to where your data actually resides.
Released in 2014 Microsoft brought Orleans up to a Community Technical Preview. Since then, they have been transferring it to an open systems project that is sure to have a lot of momentum. Take a look at Orleans, and leave your feedback.http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/orleans
Cheers,
Ben