microsoftlogo1-1024x680Microsoft has released its Project Orleans cloud computing framework as an open source project, putting it into the hands of developers worldwide.

Orleans has been “used extensively” by Microsoft to build out its Azure web services, and is also powering the backend behind Halo 4’s online infrastructure, which runs entirely on Azure.

The move will put a bunch of power in the hands of programmers who aren’t experts at building distributed systems and help them more effectively build cloud-scale applications. That’s particularly important in this day and age, as more programming loads shift to the cloud, and even startups might need to scale very quickly in order to keep up with user growth.

Microsoft first released Orleans as a preview to developers at its Build conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

Orleans uses something known as the “Actor model” of programming, which ties together a bunch of software objects into a single actor that can interact with other actors to handle tasks. But unlike existing frameworks like Erlang and Akka, Orleans handles much of the housekeeping inherent in managing a distributed system in order to make coding a service like Halo’s more accessible to non-experts. (For the nitty-gritty technical details, check out the Orleans team’s write-up here.)

It’s a part of the company’s greater open source push, which started this year when Microsoft released key parts of its .NET framework as open source projects. Orleans is powered by .NET, so it makes sense that Microsoft would include it in its cohort of open-source programming tools.

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