Designing and building distributed systems is hard. It involves many moving parts, such as loosely coupled services, data stores and message brokers. There are also very different architectural patterns that can be applied when building these systems, each with their pros and cons.

In this session, I'll show practical use cases that explain both the actor model and service orchestration using workflow as code. I'll be using Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, a graduated CNCF project used by hundreds of organizations to run microservices at scale in production. I'll run examples in C# for both of these patterns and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Topics covered in this session include: state management, concurrency, durable execution, and workflow patterns such as fan-out/fan-in, monitor, and waiting for external events.

By the end of the session, you'll have a good understanding of the actor model and workflow as code and know in which situations to apply them.