Microsoft will open source cloud platform Project Orleans next year

Microsoft has announced open source Project Orleans, a framework for building scaling cloud services. Orleans was used in the development of the game Halo 4. The software should be available on GitHub early next year.

Project Orleans is built with .Net. According to Microsoft, the framework can be used to build cloud services that can handle millions of users and where the software can be scaled relatively easily to over thousands of servers. Microsoft states that Project Orleans is useful, among other things, for enabling services such as social networking, as well as for collecting statistics and providing components for interactive entertainment services. Orleans would have been used, among other things, to develop various services for Azure and to build services that are used for the online components of the game Halo 4, Computerworld writes.

Microsoft will publish Project Orleans source code, written by the software giant’s eXtreme Computing Group, on GitHub early next year. The framework will receive an MIT license.

According to Microsoft, it is relatively easy to develop code based on Orleans, because unlike Google App Engine, for example, it has an asynchronous set-up and no multithreading is used. Furthermore, Orleans works on the basis of containers for storing and processing data, so that programmers do not have to deal with things like garbage collection.