Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object

This is a really interesting design, but these kinds of smart systems always inhabit an uncanny valley for me. You need them in exactly two cases:

1. You have a really high-load system that you need to figure out some clever ways to scale.

2. You're working on a toy project for fun.

If #2, fine, use whatever you want, it's great.

If this is production, or for Work(TM), you need something proven. If you don't know you need this, you don't need it, go with a boring Postgres database and a VM or something.

If you do know you need this, then you're kind of in a bind: It's not really very mature yet, as it's pretty new, and you're probably going to hit a bunch of weird edge cases, which you probably don't really want to have to debug or live with.

So, who are these systems for, in the end? They're so niche that they can't easily mature and be used by lots of serious players, and they're too complex with too many tradeoffs to be used by 99.9% of companies.

The only people I know for sure are the target market for this sort of thing is the developers who see something shiny, build a company (or, worse, build someone else's company) on it, and then regret it pretty soon and move to something else (hopefully much more boring).

Does anyone have more insight on this? I'd love to know.

I'd view the split here along the axes of debuggability/introspection.

There are many services that just don't require performance tuning or deep introspection, things like internal tools. This is where I think serverless frameworks do well, because they avoid a lot of time spent on deployment. It's nice if these are fast, but that's rarely a key requirement. Usually the key requirement is that they are fast to build and low maintenance. It's possible that Cloudflare have got a good story for developer experience here that gets things working quickly, but that's not their pitch, and there are a lot of services competing to make this sort of development fast.

However where I don't think these services work well is when you have high debuggability and introspection requirements. What metrics do I get out of this? What happens if some Durable Objects are just slow, do we have the information to understand why? Can we rectify it if they are? What's the logging story, and how much does it cost?

I think these sorts of services may be a good idea for a startup on day 1 to build some clever distributed system in order to put off thinking about scaling, but I can't help but think that scale-up sized companies would be wanting to move off this onto something they can get into the details more with, and that transition would be a hard one.