Wonder if this will become common practice from now on ?
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Feels very weird, but is logically sound: owners know exactly what they want and so they can work with Claude et al to iterate on features faster than with most drive-by contributors.
It reads like an "end of an era" but I imagine the steady state will be somewhere in the middle: high trust, high context contributors will still be able to contribute meaningful work.
It's super super exciting having an age where many pieces of software can all run with low profiles. Very timely, again, for the unbelievably order of magnitude (and thats 10 to the not 2 to the, for you fellow computer nerds) ish ram crunch we are in. Next up, at some point, ideally we get some v8-like runtimes where we can share libraries across multiple isolates! Separating the shared code from the shared data, so we have multiple instances of the library, seems much harder. (It feels like wasm has some/much promise here and I eagerly await clearer signals that code-sharing while sandboxing is indeed possible)
So happy to see support for running durable objects outside of one provider. Upvoted.
The "durable object" concept has been repeatably demonstrated to be a valuable abstraction.
"Each object is its own SQLite database, addressed by name and replicated to an S3-compatible bucket you own" -- this concept can take you a long way, both in its power and simplicity.
workerd is missing the scheduler - the thing that allows it to operate across nodes. Durable Object storage are just local sqlite databases.
celld is the full distributed system (albeit single tenant). It distributes DOs (cells) across any number of VMs. The databases for each DO are in object storage with RPO=0 guarantee.
bummer this expects NFS; this is all a brand new implementation vs what Cloudflare runs internally in production for DOs? I can’t imagine all your workerds share a single global NFS… What would a more realistic workerd with DO support look like?
Honestly, you wouldn't want to run our internal implementation -- it's far too complicated. Unless you have 100+ datacenters around the world -- then maybe.
The goal of this new design is to scale to a cluster while being operationally very easy to set up. Ideal for self-hosting.
NFSv4 is an easy first step, convenient because it's broadly understood, has many implementations, and requires no client libraries. I could imagine a follow-up to support LiteFS instead of NFS could make a lot of sense, though it'll get more complicated.
But yes, celld is definitely ahead of us here. No doubt about that.
Could someone explain to me in practice how one would use these to do… a thing? Like a straightforward use case? Having trouble figuring out what these are for
celld's README states "Object-storage compare-and-swap ensures that exactly one node owns a cell at a time," but I'm skeptical this actually holds at the point where data is written to storage - I had an AI skim through the code with me, and the actual segment writes looked like plain, unconditional PUTs with no epoch check.
In many cases, I think using Cloudflare's Durable Objects is probably the right call instead.
Ryan & the Deno team thanks for this. not that I'm going to use it anytime soon - but yeah having durable objects outside Cloudflare and also self hosted ones means a lot.
claim is that very many things are not needed, but they are. they are just provided by the layer beneath (S3). so isn't correctness highly dependent on s3 correctness? was s3 built for that, vs just plain durability? for example, would it be just as reliable with minio?
i would prefer a thing that was more self-contained, not dependent on a black box service layer underneath.
much apologies if i just have a poor understanding.
Hey, is this something that compares to Temporal or Restate or Azure Durable Functions? If so, what are the differences and when would I use Cells instead of the aforementioned?
I think the way to decide is, do you want to program with "objects" or "processes"?
I'd use Durable Objects (or what I called Session Backends in my article, after Jamsocket) if I wanted to model an "entity" that lasts indefinitely (e.g. a Figma doc, a user, a concert/event). I'd use a temporal/restate function for something that has a linear sequence of events and eventually comes to an end.
This isn't a hard rule. You can get the same outcome out of both technologies. (For example, Cloudflare built Workflows on top of Durable Objects; Rivet did the reverse.) You can use either one to implement the other, but you're going to be going out of your way based on what APIs are provided.
I don't see why not. Somebody once wrote a simple Lambda that spawns a new instance when your spot instance dies so there's always at least one running.
the stuff is great when it works but Durable Objects can be quite expensive. whenever i get too excited about em all it takes is a little time trying to price it out to calm me down.
it’s all relative and it really depends on your scale. if your usage fits in the included compute and request count you get for $60/yr it’s absolutely gonna be cheaper. on the other hand, you can run EKS clusters in usw2, use2, apne1, apne2, euc1 for $8600/yr based on my napkin math. to me that does not sound expensive, i work at a company where $8600 is pocket change. but $8600 is much larger than $60/yr for region: earth.
If it were intended to be a direct alternative for the biggest use case, I think it would be more like Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. However, I think it's an alternative for a lot of uses of those two things. For a lot of uses of them, likely most uses, they are overkill.
So where it's overkill, this is where Celld is a good fit. It's a 100% open play, despite mentioning three hosted APIs: S3, Cloudflare Workers, and Durable Objects. The thing is, that Deno tried making similar ones. Deno Deploy is analagous to S3, and Deno KV is analagous to Durable Objects. However, with Celld the only dependencies are being able to run a binary and some S3-compatible storage. Cloudflare provides S3 compatible storage, but this README doesn't mention that, except in an example. Perhaps Ryan is leaving the door open for Deno to be acquired by Cloudflare.
on the one hand, hosting is hard, you should pay people to host, especially distributed systems.
on the other hand, deno land folks stole from (used open source from) the best. the coordination layer/control-plane is all S3 CAS of dumb json files, which is a fantastic common-mode infra requirement for most orgs anyways, & perhaps a durable control-plane substrate you'd feel comfortable having someone else run (such as aws or others), while you run the data-plane (workers) yourself. and then for the durable objects themselves, they used litestream, which is a pretty top pick, excellent way to get radical distribution (but actual topology not included, some assembly required)! https://hn.algolia.com/?q=litestream
there's no reason this wouldn't run fine on most hosting, you definitely don't need bare metal. the virtues of v8 sandboxing / isolates! no need for vm's at all, no nested vm difficulties if you are trying to host on a shared host! but if you're asking questions like this, i want to again point you back to my top point.
With apologies to Obama, if you like Cloudflare you can keep your Cloudflare. It looks like celld is not intended to be an exact clone of Cloudflare but is for someone who wants to run a bunch of workers in a single region.
sure, but s3 is far easier to buy and also far more reliable than typical distributed systems coordinator stuff like etcd/zookeeper/consul. every major cloud offers it, and there’s several decent open source options.
I haven't deep-dived into celld. Does it requires s3's strong consistency to be correct? or is any s3 api compatible object storage sufficient even if they lack strong consistency guarantee?
