Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects

> At this time, we are not seeking outside contribution.

> AI has made writing code easy. The hard part, today, is not writing the code, but reviewing it, making sure quality stays high, and keeping the product coherent. In that light, unfortunately, external code contributions are "donating" the easy part of the job, while creating more of the hard work.

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.

More practical example (serverless WebSockets) https://youtu.be/FgWVoryZ8PU

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.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I'm probably missing your point, but aren't wasm memories achieving exactly this? Just an example from wasmtime: https://docs.wasmtime.dev/examples-multimemory.html

It's like fixing all the problems with democracy by putting everyone in charge of their own 1-person election.

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.

> do i need to buy bare metal

my first idea would be to run celld on AWS Kubernetes deployed to local zones https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/auto-local-...

it’s not “region: earth” like cloudflare but perhaps worth the trade off.

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.

FWIW here's an old Deno blog post comparing Durable Objects to other stuff: https://denoland.medium.com/deno-kv-vs-cloudflare-workers-kv...

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.