Durable Actors - Open-source durable objects with configurable compute
Show HN: Durable Actors – OSS Durable Objects with configurable compute
Durable Actors is an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects that lets you build real-time applications like chat systems, collaboration tools, and agent swarms without vendor lock-in. It provides stateful serverless functions with durable state and serialized execution, so data survives crashes and concurrent updates stay safe. Define actors in TypeScript or Python, auto-generate type-safe clients, develop locally with one command, and self-host on GCP. Built-in observability makes monitoring and debugging easy, while a live demo and quickstart multiplayer AI chat show how quickly you can get started.
Durable Actors help you build real-time applications like chat systems, collaboration tools, and agent swarms—stateful serverless functions that abstract away persistence, coordination, and infrastructure challenges in distributed systems.
- jeremycarter
Looks great but one of the common problems with the virtual actor model is state query. It's all well and good to have nice separated state dbs but for most use cases that means further double up on storing the state again in another database that can query it. I don't think anyone has come up with a nice solution for this problem without using a loose document database, but even then actors can change their schema.
Perhaps emitting versioned domain events transactionally with the actor state is an option without prescribing an exact solution.
- verst
How do you compare to Azure Durable Functions, Temporal, AWS Lambda Durable Functions?
Can't Durable Entities meet the same use cases?
EDIT: Of course I am not talking about the difference in OSS vs not. Rather I'm interested in the difference in use cases and capabilities. Some of the aforementioned have ways to run things locally as well, though they are designed as distributed cloud-based PaaS services.
- divyagnan
This looks really nice! How would you compare it to Rivet? I think they were also originally pitched as an open source version of durable objects: https://rivet.dev/actors/compare/rivet-actors-vs-cloudflare-...
Also are you able to self-host this outside of GCP (from the docs it seems like it is locked to GCP but I'm not that familiar with it so maybe not)?