[reubenbond]

Given how Ray "provides [...] exactly-once semantics" for its actors, you could draw similarities between it and workflow-as-code frameworks such as https://temporal.io. The way that Ray splits up actors and tasks looks similar to Temporal's Workflows + Activities split: Workflows (Ray actors) contain orchestration logic and have their method calls/results durably logged. Activities (Ray tasks) perform the expensive computations and any interaction with external systems and are not durably logged.

If you're in the .NET ecosystem or interested in distributed systems in general, you may like Orleans (https://github.com/dotnet/orleans), which I work on at Microsoft. Orleans contributes the Virtual Actor model which other modern actor frameworks are starting to adopt since it is well suited for the hectic, failure-prone environment of distributed systems (which those so-called Cloud Native Apps live in). The Ray paper linked from the article (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-moritz.pdf) discusses some similarities. Slight correction on the paper: it states that "For message delivery, Orleans provides at-least-once [...] semantics". It's at-most-once. At-least-once messaging semantics (usually implemented via automatic retries) aren't ideal for these kinds of systems, in my opinion.

[mlerner]

Neat - thanks for sharing! A friend mentioned Orleans, queueing up the paper (found this one https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/orleans...) for future reading.