The term “microservices” is a hot new trend in scalable systems. The added flexibility you get from composing small systems can help to maximize the value of cloud systems and remove bottlenecks from complex applications. But this approach implies a lot of extra complexity and doesn’t usually make sense for smaller systems. What if we could gain some of the advantages of microservices without having to handle so many independent pieces? A happy medium exists in the form of Actor model frameworks like Akka.NET and Project Orleans. In this talk, I’ll be demonstrating some of the capabilities of these frameworks, including high scalability, ridiculously flexible deployments, and event-based persistence.