This talk will detail how the Halo 4 team at 343 Industries used the Orleans technology from Microsoft Research to build the cloud services that power the Halo 4 blockbuster title. Attendees will learn about the paradigm shift that the team went through to think about building cloud-native services using Orleans and how that transition resulted in their ability to rapidly design services that are simpler to maintain and evolve as well as being easier to conceptualize. Participants will leave this talk understanding how to use Orleans to build highly-concurrent, stateful services that scale-by-default. Participants will also learn how the virtual actor concept makes it easier to reason about and achieve fault-tolerance in the cloud.

It's an hour long, but I don't think you'll get a better behind-the-covers look anywhere else.