The Guide to Cloudflare's Durable Objects

a year ago

Durable Objects are a unique feature of Cloudflare's developer platform, enabling stateful serverless applications.
They allow for the instant creation of mini servers globally with built-in durable storage and can hibernate between requests.
Durable Objects support features like coordination in multiplayer scenarios, built-in WebSocket capabilities, and alarms for scheduled execution.
They are globally distributed, reducing latency and improving redundancy, with automatic failover and recovery mechanisms.
Common use cases include multiplayer applications, real-time collaboration tools, and multi-tenancy in SaaS applications.
Durable Objects can be created and managed via code, with APIs for synchronous calls (fetch & RPC), alarms, and storage (key-value & SQLite).
SQLite-backed Durable Objects offer zero-latency queries and point-in-time recovery, making them ideal for complex data storage.
Built-in WebSocket support simplifies real-time communication, with Durable Objects hibernating between messages to save costs.
The Agents SDK leverages Durable Objects for AI agents, providing capabilities like MCP support, state synchronization, and scheduling.
Observability and cost considerations are important, with tools like Workers Logs and pricing based on requests, duration, and storage.

Hasty Briefsbeta