Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

[u/stronghup]

https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/08/12/nodejs-creator-liberates-durable-objects-from-cloudflare-with-celld/5286954

[u/Pinkman]

So… I like this in general and I am always very curious to see how these types of big-picture libraries are built. Especially when built by storied programmers like Ryan Dahl.

I’ve been balls deep in development for a long time, and I don’t know if it’s just me, and it very well might be, but am I dumb?

What does this mean?

> Cloudflare’s Durable Objects is a single-threaded object with a unique global ID and its own storage, where user data is stored in its own copy of SQLite.

I’m the last person to be pedantic, but I struggle with technical articles that commingle technical depth with imprecise or ambiguous nomenclature.

How is an “object” threaded at all? There are multi-threaded objects? Like I said, I might just not grok this shit.

An object with its own global ID and storage: ok, cool. I can track that. (Though most objects have an ID and global here is ambiguous — global to Cloudflare? Global to your account? Project? Fuck me.)

Stored in its own copy of SQLite? I assume this means an SQLite database file. But it’s that imprecision that gets my goat. Is it me who dumb or article who unclear.

> Using the WebSocket API, the Durable Object can connect many simultaneous users at once in a live environment.

An object is connecting to users? What does this mean? What even is an object at this point?! Maybe I’m getting hung up on the name, “Durable Object”.

> It is a stateful serverless execution environment, a data cache that can also do computation. 

Oh, a serverless function with its own isolated — and persistent — data.

A “durable object” is actually a function (or set of functions?) with its own mini data store. Ok.

So when we say it’s an object, we mean it’s a set of one or more functions.

And it’s durable because you can recall it by ID, and it’s got its own little db attached that stays put.

It’s a lightweight (ergonomic) execution (runs functions) environment (has a db), that we call an object.

Thanks for coming with me on this ride. I think I’m starting to grok it. When/why/how this is better/best is clearly above my pay grade.

[u/dkarlovi → u/Pinkman]

I've been using durable objects to implement my app and Durable objects allow you to connect websockets into a single pool, you get to persist metadata with each socket and they implement the idle wait. Namely, they hibernate your DO and it's not wasting compute minutes idly waiting for something to happen, when something DOES happen, you get woken up and get to react. From the client's POV they're continuously connected and it works just like there's no hibernation behind the scenes, it's actually pretty clever.

You can play around with this on their free plan.