Microsoft Orleans — Reminders and grains calling grains

Photo by Linda Perez Johannessen on Unsplash

Orleans is an actor model framework — a framework used for easily creating distributed systems across a cluster of machines. In this post we’ll explore the “Reminders” feature of Orleans.

First off, the docs:

Timers and Reminders | Microsoft Orleans Documentation

Reminders can be used in Orleans to perform tasks on a “schedule” more or less. I’m having trouble thinking of a simple example that actually makes sense, so, we’re going to go with an everything’s ok alarm:

To build the everything’s ok alarm, we’ll need to do a few things:

• Enable a reminder service within the ISiloHostBuilder — we’ll use the in memory one just for simplicity's sake, and to not have to rely on additional infrastructure
• A new reminder grain