Building the Halo 4 Services with Orleans

Halo 4 is a first-person shooter on the Xbox 360, with fast-paced, competitive gameplay. To complement the code on disc a set of services were developed and deployed in Azure to store player statistics, display player presence information, deliver daily challenges, modify playlists, catch cheaters and more. These services needed to support high demand, with low latency, and high availability. In this session will discuss some of the challenges faced while building this services, and how Orleans, Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability, was utilized to solve these problems.

Orleans paper link: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/210931/Orleans-MSR-TR-2014-41.pdf