Messages One of the most fundamental concepts to the Actor model is the notion of “message-driven systems,” as defined by the Reactive Manifesto: A message is an item of data that is sent to a specific destination. An event is a signal emitted by a component upon reaching a given state. In a message-driven system addressable recipients await the arrival of messages and react to them, otherwise lying dormant. Read more...

Module 1: Introduction to Actor Model and Proto.Actor Concepts you will learn Welcome to the course on building parallel applications based on the actor model and the Proto.Actor platform. Creating parallel, distributed, and robust applications is a complicated task. However, using the actor model and the Proto.Actor platform significantly simplifies this task. With Proto. Actor, you no longer have to worry about manually managing threads and locking shared resources. Instead, you will use high-level abstractions such as Actors and Messages. Read more...

Proto.Actor Framework TLDR; Just show me the code! Hello World Getting Started Getting Started With Grains / Virtual Actors (.NET) Deploy to Kubernetes Introduction What is Proto.Actor? Why Proto.Actor Design Principles Features Concepts What is an Actor? What is a Message? Terminology, Concepts Supervision and Monitoring Actor lifecycle Location Transparency Message Delivery Reliability Building Blocks Core Features Actor - What are actors? Read more...

Proto.Cluster [Homage to Proto.Actors Swedish roots, Swedish midsummer ring dance - Connected Cluster Actors] Virtual Actors, aka. Grains Proto.Cluster leverages the “Virtual Actor Model”, which was pioneered by Microsoft Orleans. Unlike the traditional Actor Model used in Erlang or Akka, where developers must care about actor lifecycles, placement and failures. The virtual actor model instead focus on ease of use, high availability where most of the complexity have been abstracted away from the developer. Read more...

Scheduling Messages In C#, we provide the SimpleScheduler implementation of the ISimpleSchedulerinterface. This allows you to do operations such as ScheduleTellOnce, ScheduleRequestOnce and ScheduleTellRepeatedly ISimpleScheduler scheduler = new SimpleScheduler(); var pid = context.Spawn(Actor.FromProducer(() => new ScheduleGreetActor())); scheduler .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 1")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(200), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 2")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(300), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 3")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(400), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 4")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(500), context.Self, new SimpleMessage("test 5")) .ScheduleRequestOnce(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), context.Self, pid, new Greet("Daniel")) .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), context.Self, new Hello()) . Read more...

Supervision This document outlines the concept behind supervision and what that means for your Proto.Actor actors at run-time. What Supervision means Supervision describes a dependency relationship between actors: the supervisor delegates tasks to subordinates and therefore must respond to their failures. When a subordinate detects a failure (i.e. throws an exception), it suspends itself and all its subordinates and sends a message to its supervisor, signaling failure. Depending on the nature of the work to be supervised and the nature of the failure, the supervisor has a choice of the following four options: Read more...

Terminology and Concepts In this chapter we attempt to establish a common terminology to define a solid ground for communicating about concurrent, distributed systems which Proto.Actor targets. Please note that, for many of these terms, there is no single agreed definition. We simply seek to give working definitions that will be used in the scope of the Proto.Actor documentation. Concurrency vs. Parallelism Concurrency and parallelism are related concepts, but there are small differences. Read more...

What is Proto.Actor? Proto.Actor is a Next generation Actor Model framework. Over the last few years we have seen two competing approaches of actors emerging. First we have the classical Erlang/Classic Akka style actors, and later came the Microsoft Orleans style “virtual actors” or “Grains”. These two ways both yield different benefits and drawbacks. Proto.Actor unifies both of these two ways of working under a common framework. Proto.Actor solves another major issue, none of the pre-existing actor model frameworks or languages can communicate between platforms. Read more...

Why Proto.Actor? What features can the Proto.Actor platform offer over the competition? Proto.Actor provides scalable, real-time transaction processing. Proto.Actor is a unified runtime and programming model for: Scale up (Concurrency) Scale out (Remote) Fault tolerance With one thing to learn and admin, with high cohesion and coherent semantics. Proto.Actor is a very scalable piece of software; not only in the context of performance, but also in the size of applications it is useful for. Read more...