TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

Orleans - Cloud Computing for Everyone - ACM SOCC 2011

Jorgen Thelin — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 11:08:08 GMT

My team's latest technical paper has been accepted for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC 2011)

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=153347

Orleans: Cloud Computing for Everyone

Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm, combining diverse client devices - PCs, smartphones, sensors, single-function, and embedded - with computation and data storage in the cloud. As with every advance in computing, programming is a fundamental challenge, as the cloud is a concurrent, distributed system running on unreliable hardware and networks.

Orleans is a software framework for building reliable, scalable, and elastic cloud applications. Its programming model encourages the use of simple concurrency patterns that are easy to understand and employ correctly. It is based on distributed actor-like components called grains, which are isolated units of state and computation that communicate through asynchronous messages. Within a grain, promises are the mechanism for managing both asynchronous messages and local task-based concurrency. Isolated state and a constrained execution model allow Orleans to persist, migrate, replicate, and reconcile grain state. In addition, Orleans provides lightweight transactions that support a consistent view of state and provide a foundation for automatic error handling and failure recovery.

We implemented several applications in Orleans, varying from a messaging-intensive social networking application to a data- and compute-intensive linear algebra computation. The programming model is a general one, as Orleans allows the communications to evolve dynamically at runtime. Orleans enables a developer to concentrate on application logic, while the Orleans runtime provides scalability, availability, and reliability.

Blog Post Copyright (c) 2011 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved. Original article location: http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2011/10/orleans_cloud_computing_for_everyone_acm_socc_2011.html

Performance - DateTime.UtcNow vs DateTime.Now

Jorgen Thelin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:06:24 GMT

Did you know that in C# programming, using DateTime.UtcNow to get the current date/time is ~3.3x faster than DateTime.Now ?

Orleans on MSDN Channel 9

Jorgen Thelin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:11:07 GMT

Yesterday Charles Torre came round to our building to film a Channel 9 Going Deep session with the Orleans team, which has now been posted on MSDN.

Project Orleans: A Framework for Scalable Distributed Computing (Client + Cloud)

Orleans is a Microsoft Research (MSR) project and managed (.NET) software framework for building client + cloud applications. As outlined in the recently released paper on the topic:

Orleans defines an actor-like model of isolated grains that communicate through asynchronous messages and manage asynchronous computations with promises. The isolated state and constrained execution model of grains allows the Orleans runtime to persist, migrate, replicate, and reconcile grain state without programmer intervention. Orleans also provides lightweight, optimistic, distributed transactions that provide predictable consistency and failure handling for distributed operations across multiple grains.

Here, we meet the Orleans team -- Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, Gabriel Kliot, James Larus, Ravi Pandya, and Jorgen Thelin -- as they introduce Orleans and provide insights into the rationale and design decisions behind the project and also spend a fair amount of time focusing on the basic unit of isolated computation in Orleans, the grain. Very interesting and promising research (pun intended)!

I highly recommend that you read the paper -- it's very approachable and makes many aspects of Orleans crystal clear. In fact, that's the goal of the Orleans framework: to make reliable and scalable distributed concurrent computing easier for developers to program. As we all know, it's hard to effectively program scalable distributed concurrent systems reliably. Orleans's goal is to change this by exploring new approaches (grain-based programming) using novel combinations of time-tested programming models and technologies (actors, promises, transactions, C#, CLR, etc).

Tune in. Enjoy.

MSR Tech Report - Orleans: A Framework for Cloud Computing - MSR-TR-2010-159

Jorgen Thelin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:43:53 GMT

Technical report MSR-TR-2010-159 about our team's Orleans project is now available on the Microsoft Research website.

Orleans: A Framework for Cloud Computing

Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, Gabriel Kliot, James Larus, Ravi Pandya, and Jorgen Thelin
30 November 2010

Client + cloud computing is a disruptive, new computing platform, combining diverse client devices -- PCs, smartphones, sensors, and single-function and embedded devices -- with the unlimited, on-demand computation and data storage offered by cloud computing services such as Amazon's AWS or Microsoft's Windows Azure. As with every advance in computing, programming is a fundamental challenge as client + cloud computing combines many difficult aspects of software development.

Orleans is a software framework for building client + cloud applications. Orleans encourages use of simple concurrency patterns that are easy to understand and implement correctly, building on an actor-like model with declarative specification of persistence, replication, and consistency and using lightweight transactions to support the development of reliable and scalable client + cloud software.

Blog Post Copyright (c) 2011 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved. Original article location: http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2010/11/msr_tech_report_orleans_a_framework_for_cloud_computing_msrt.html

Current Projects - Orleans and Large Distributed Graphs

Jorgen Thelin — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:42:43 GMT

This week, our team has published a few pages on the Microsoft Research web site covering what we are currently working:

Enjoy.

Blog Post Copyright (c) 2011 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved. Original article location: http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2010/10/current_projects_orleans_and_large_distributed_graphs.html

PowerShell - Which version of Windows are we running on?

Jorgen Thelin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 09:54:57 GMT

In PowerShell, how can you find out which version of Windows are we running on?

Solution:

Start a PowerShell window and type Get-WMIObject Win32_OperatingSystem

Output should say something like:

SystemDirectory : C:\Windows\system32
Organization    : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
BuildNumber     : 7600
RegisteredUser : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
SerialNumber    : XXXXX-XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXX
Version         : 6.1.7600

Blog Post Copyright (c) 2011 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved. Original article location: http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2010/10/powershell_which_version_of_windows_are_we_running_on.html

PowerShell - Which version of PowerShell are we running?

Jorgen Thelin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:32:41 GMT

How can you find out which version of PowerShell is installed on your PC?

Solution:

Start a PowerShell window and type Get-Host
Output should say something like:

Name : ConsoleHost
Version : 2.0

Windows Azure Security Overview White Paper

Jorgen Thelin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:18:39 GMT

A new white paper "Windows Azure Security Overview" has just been released that provides a comprehensive look at the broad range of security features and functionality available with Windows Azure.

The paper describes the array of controls that Windows Azure customers can use to achieve their required level of security, control and compliance most suitable for their unique requirements.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9740388

Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 - Moving Applications to the Cloud

Jorgen Thelin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:15:42 GMT

Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 - Moving Applications to the Cloud

For an introduction to developing cloud-based services on Windows Azure, check out the new Windows Azure Architecture Guide, Part 1 which covers a migration walk-through for moving existing applications to the cloud.

This interactive guide is the first volume in a planned series about the Windows Azure platform that will cover both "brownfield" and "greenfield" scenarios - migrating existing apps or writing new apps for running on the Azure cloud platform.

The Windows Azure Architecture Guide, Part 1 walks you through the migration of a traditionally developed and hosted service to a Windows Azure hosted service. From architecture to best practices and design concepts, the guide outlines exactly how the application was migrated to Windows Azure.

Use the guide as a reference for key Windows Azure architecture concepts such as:

Authentication and authorization
Data storage and access
Session management
Deployment
Development life cycle
Cost analysis

http://waag.blob.core.windows.net/partone/index.html

Sample code and a PDF version of the doc is available from CodePlex - http://wag.codeplex.com/

Blog Post Copyright (c) 2011 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved. Original article location: http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2010/08/windows_azure_architecture_guide_part_1_moving_applications.html

ILMerge

Jorgen Thelin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:00:00 GMT

ILMerge is a utility that can be used to merge multiple .NET assemblies into a single assembly. ILMerge takes a set of input assemblies and merges them into one target assembly. The first assembly in the list of input assemblies is the primary assembly. When the primary assembly is an executable, then the target assembly is created as an executable with the same entry point as the primary assembly. Also, if the primary assembly has a strong name, and a .snk file is provided, then the target assembly is re-signed with the specified key so that it also has a strong name.

Kindle 3 aka Kindle Wi-Fi

Jorgen Thelin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:43:06 GMT

Amazon has announced the release of a new version of the Kindle Reader at the new lower price point of $139 for a Wi-Fi only model.

The all-new Kindle model has a new electronic-ink screen with 50 percent better contrast than any other e-reader, a new sleek design with a 21 percent smaller body while still keeping the same 6-inch-size reading area, and a 15 percent lighter weight at just 8.7 ounces. The new Kindle also offers 20 percent faster page turns, up to one month of battery life, double the storage to 3,500 books, built-in Wi-Fi, and a graphite color option.

Trading the 3G wireless feature for a new lower price point makes a lot of sense to me, and would even persuade me to buy one for reading mostly around the house, although i still find the Kindle Reader app on iPhone more contenient for reading on the go.

You can pre-order now for delivery on the August 27 release date.

Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Posters

Jorgen Thelin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:58:59 GMT

Reference posters from MSDN for the default keybindings in Visual Studio 2010 for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F#. Provided as print-ready PDF files in letter & A4 format.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=92CED922-D505-457A-8C9C-84036160639F&displaylang=en

Parallel Programming in .NET Framework 4

Jorgen Thelin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:09:53 GMT

The C# team have posted a set of 3 blog articles to help people to grok the basics of using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and other parallel programming features in .NET Framework 4.0

The articles walk us through how to make a simple Windows Forms use parallel threads to keep your UI responsive to user interaction even while performing compute intensive calculations and operations.

Well worth a read.

F# PowerPack

Jorgen Thelin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:20:37 GMT

The F# PowerPack is a collection of libraries and tools for use with the F# programming language provided by the F# team at Microsoft.

Contents include a functional interface to standard .NET collections, F# versions of lex and yacc, a tool for generating HTML documentation from F# libraries, support for using F# with LINQ-based libraries, parallel LINQ integration, CodeDOM Implementation, F# Metadata Reader and much more.

http://fsharppowerpack.codeplex.com/

Kanban and Scrum

Jorgen Thelin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:09:13 GMT

Kanban is gaining traction in the agile software development community as a process framework that is even more lightweight then Scrum, but which still delivers many of the same benefits for many projects.

InfoQ have a free online PDF version of a book by Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin comparing Kanban and Scrum, including examples and case studies where each process might be most useful.

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook

Scrum and Kanban are two flavours of Agile software development - two deceptively simple but surprisingly powerful approaches to software development. So how do they relate to each other?

The purpose of this book is to clear up the fog, so you can figure out
how Kanban and Scrum might be useful in your environment.

You can also purchase a printed copy of the book if you prefer.