Question: MS Orleans support?

[VincentH-Net]

Is there any Aspire support/guidance planned for Microsoft Orleans?

• Orleans is a natural fit in the cloud native space - especially for C# devs
• OpenTelemetry observability is already built in

If not, any advice / pointers on how to integrate it?

Example scenario

E.g. a scenario that I will be implementing in the coming months is running Orleans in Azure Container Apps (auto-scale) with both REST endpoints (minimal API's) and SignalR endpoints (BFF for WASM browser and native mobile clients, built in C# with Uno Platform)

I'm looking for ways to make end2end observability easier to achieve and maintain:
Rest API -> Orleans grains / streams chain <-> SignalR <-> client
And I'm wondering if Aspire could help with that.

Any insights appreciated! (@ReubenBond ?)

[ReubenBond]

Hi @VincentH-Net! We've discussed this and we agree that Orleans is a natural fit here. I think we could have two main pieces:

• An Aspire AppHost Orleans cluster resource which consists of:
  • Default cluster, Grain persistence, & Reminder storage (we can pick Azure Table Storage for clustering & reminders, and Azure Blob Storage for grain state)
  • ClusterId / ServiceId values, and any other common configuration
  • The ability to add this resource to the service projects (i.e, where the Orleans silos & clients live)
• An Aspire Orleans Component which pulls in the requisite packages (Eg, the Azure Storage providers) and uses IConfiguration (specified by the AppHost component in the dev case) to configure them.
  • It should also configure Open Telemetry integration, as you mentioned

@benjaminpetit is looking into this. Your input is greatly appreciated.

[benjaminpetit]

Hi @VincentH-Net ,

Quickly discussed with @ReubenBond, and I think for storage we should provision three different storage instances:

• one for clustering
• one for reminders
• one for grain states

For local dev we could start an azurite docker instance. Or even maybe target some real storage if they are available?

[VincentH-Net]

Thanks @ReubenBond, that sounds promising!

I'll follow up with @benjaminpetit - he already mailed me.

[davidfowl]

@benjaminpetit Why 3?

[benjaminpetit]

If I am not mistaken, it doesn't cost more, but you benefit isolation from each other:

• reminders can do a lot of requests
• same for storage
• clustering doesn't, but it's better if it doesn't get throttled because of reminder or storage.

Plus, we could do premium blob storage for grain storage, cosmosdb for reminders, and simple table storage for clustering for example.

[VincentH-Net]

@benjaminpetit quick questions:

• perhaps offer very lightweight and simple option(s) for local dev, e.g. in-memory or SqLite? Devs usually process very little data on local machines
• is blob storage also a good option for many grains with small state size, or would table storage be better then? If yes, offer the dev a simple way to choose?
• why would you need cosmosdb? It is powerful but also potentially complex & expensive - perhaps not a good fit when trying to make things simpler for devs...

[ReubenBond]

is blob storage also a good option for many grains with small state size, or would table storage be better then? If yes, offer the dev a simple way to choose?

Blobs are a good default, especially because they don't have the 1MB limit which table rows do and they have lower overhead (no splitting / joining columns, less encoding), plus there are more price/performance/durability options for blob storage than with tables. The two most appropriate options for grain storage in Azure are Blobs & Cosmos DB, in my opinion.

[danmoseley]

dotnet/aspire-samples#20

[aL3891]

i'd also love orleans support,
for local dev though i'd prefer to only use in memory storage (at least as an option), but maybe you're talking about the opinionated defaults for deploying?

we do in memory clustering when running locally but also do reminders in the local postgres database, (and dont use grain persistence at all) so being able to configure them individually would be great, even if there is also a kitchen-and-sink option that configures everything

[ReubenBond]

@aL3891 understood. I imagine we will offer a set of default choices as well as a way to configure providers in a more finer-grained manner.

[ReubenBond]

Small update, here's the branch for @benjaminpetit's WIP: https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/tree/rebond/bpetit/orleans-hosting

Here's a usage example showing adding Azure Table Storage for clustering and Azure Blob Storage as the "default" grain state store:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.AddAzureProvisioning();

var storage = builder.AddAzureStorage("storage");
var clusteringTable = storage.AddTables("clustering");
var grainStorage = storage.AddBlobs("grainstate");

var orleans = builder.AddOrleans("my-app")
                     .WithClustering(clusteringTable)
                     .WithGrainStorage("default", grainStorage);

builder.AddProject<Projects.OrleansServer>("silo")
       .WithOrleansServer(orleans)
       .WithReplicas(3);

using var app = builder.Build();

await app.RunAsync();

The pertinent line in the corresponding Orleans server project is builder.UseOrleansAspire(), as you can see in the sample, here:

aspire/samples/orleans/OrleansServer/Program.cs

Line 7 in aaa5d25

builder.UseOrleansAspire();

[VincentH-Net]

@ReubenBond I succeeded in getting OrleansAppHost from https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/tree/rebond/bpetit/orleans-hosting to run. It took some puzzling effort to get Azure rights correct though.

The only change I had to make was in appsettings.json in the OrleansAppHost project, to update the Azure SubscriptionId.

However, I also had to assign the managed identity of the azure VM I was developing on the Storage Blob Data Contributor and Storage Table Data Contributor roles for the generated storage account.

Without those roles, host.StartAsync() throws:

Orleans.Runtime.OrleansException: 'Exception trying to create or connect to the Azure table OrleansSiloInstances'
RequestFailedException: This request is not authorized to perform this operation using this permission.
Status: 403 (Forbidden)
ErrorCode: AuthorizationPermissionMismatch

-> Perhaps good to add some guidance (readme in the sample source?) on this to help devs getting things working quickly?