Within the distributed systems community, much has been made about the "actors model" and its implications for building large-scale, fault-tolerant, highly resilient code bases. The Orleans project, from Microsoft, is the latest entry in the genre, and it represents quite a different take than the traditional WCF- or REST-based discussion. In this presentation, we'll go over what an actors model is, how Orleans implements it, and how Orleans takes a different approach on the whole subject.