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.

As far as I can tell, multiplayer is the killer app for Durable Objects. If you want to build another Figma, Google Docs, etc, the programming model of Durable Objects is super handy.

This article goes into it more: https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-cl...

I think this old article is quite relevant too: http://ithare.com/scaling-stateful-objects/

Anyone who read the Figma multiplayer article and thought "that's kind of what I need" would be well served by Durable Objects, I think. https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/

There are other approaches - I've worked in the past with CRDTs over WebRTC which felt absolutely space-age. But that's a much more complicated foundation compared to a websocket and a single class instance "somewhere" in the cloud.

That's a very interesting use case. Given that your "players" aren't guaranteed to be local to the DO, doesn't using DOs only make sense in high-traffic situations again? Otherwise you might as well just serve the players from a conventional server, no?

CRDTs really do sound amazing, though.

In practice you’re most likely to be collaborating with other folks on your school project group, work team, close family, etc. Sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking picking a service location near your first group member ensures low latency for them (and they’re probably most engaged), and is likely to have lowish latency for everyone else.

On the flip side, picking US-East-1 gives okayish latency to folks near that, and nobody else.