[New article]: Orleans Live Grain Migration

[mikekistler]

Proposed topic or title

Live migration of grains

Location in table of contents.

Learn / .NET / Orleans / Grains / Advanced features

Reason for the article

Orleans Release 7.2 added support for live migration of grains -- a grain does not need to be deactivated in order to be moved to a new silo. This support requires all the grain components to support dehydration and rehydration. The details of this are somewhat complex and need to be described for user in the documentation.

Article abstract

Live grain migration allows grains to move from one silo to another without dropping requests or losing in-memory state. Support is added to preserve the in-memory state during migration without needing to refresh from storage. This feature can be used to offload work from existing silos when a new silo is added to an Orleans cluster. It can also be beneficial when upgrading an Orleans cluster. This typically involves rolling updates across the silos, so silos upgrading early in the cycle will have substantially more grain activations than those near the end. Live migration can be used to rebalance activations across the cluster after the upgrade completes.

Relevant searches

I didn't search because I know it didn't exist -- this is a new(ish) feature.