Robust Distributed System Nucleus (rDSN)

Developed by System Research Group of Microsoft Research Asia, Robust
Distributed System Nucleus (rDSN), is now open source. rDSN is an open
framework for developers, students, and researchers to quickly build and
manage high-performance and robust distributed systems, and the latter is
critical for the success of many emerging technologies today such as cloud
computing, big data, and IoT (Internet of Things).

The idea of this framework arises during the team's past efforts to (semi-)
automatically test, debug, optimize, monitor, scale, replicate, compose, and
reason about distributed systems. A lot of challenges were encountered in those
projects, and most are due to the fact that the initial development process had
not consider these goals, resulting later maintenance difficulties.

rDSN provides a coherent framework from which developers build their systems
with minor adjustment from traditional development styles. Code built on atop
of rDSN conforms to certain principles, and can be upgraded later with little
or no cost for achieving the aforementioned goals. An early version of rDSN has
been used in Bing for building a distributed data service, and the system has
been online and running well. Based on feedbacks from the production teams,
rDSN is improved and now made public with an open source license. The goal is
to benefit the community especially developers, students, and researchers who
are working on distributed systems in various ways.