Microsoft to open-source cloud framework behind Halo 4 services

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Mary Branscombe.

Microsoft plans to open-source the framework that helps developers of cloud services like those behind the popular Halo 4 game.  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 (http://orleans.codeplex.com/) 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…

Read more from the source @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2859392/microsoft-to-opensource-cloud-framework-behind-halo-4-services.html