Orleans was originally created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research[2] and introduced the virtual actor model as a new approach to building distributed systems for the cloud.

Orleans scales from a single on-premises server to highly-available and globally distributed applications in the cloud.

[7] The core Orleans technology was transferred to 343 Industries and is available as open source since January 2015.

[9] Orleans runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS and is compatible with .NET Standard 2.0 and above.

[10] Some Orleans features include:[11] The Electronic Arts BioWare division created Project Orbit.