Today’s architectural challenges are often tackled using distributed systems with microservices as major building blocks. While microservices offer great benefits, they tend to increase the overall complexity of a system. This problem especially increases in IoT scenarios with a large number of external systems to communicate with. In this talk, Raffael and Paul will show how actor frameworks such as Microsoft Orleans - using a long-forgotten paradigm from the early days of computer science - can greatly mitigate those problems. The speakers draw from their hands-on experience in developing a globally distributed system in .NET leveraging Microsoft Orleans.