Client + cloud computing is a disruptive, new computing platform, combining diverse client devices – PCs, smartphones, sensors, and single-function and embedded devices – with the unlimited, on-demand computation and data storage offered by cloud computing services such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Windows Azure. As with every advance in computing, programming is a fundamental challenge as client + cloud computing combines many difficult aspects of software development.
Orleans is a software framework for building client + cloud applications. Orleans encourages use of simple concurrency patterns that are easy to understand and implement correctly, building on an actor-like model with declarative specification of persistence, replication, and consistency and using lightweight transactions to support the development of reliable and scalable client + cloud software.
Orleans on Microsoft Research
Source:http://blog.agafonov.net.ua/post/2011/04/12/Orleans-software-framework-for-cloud-applications.aspx