Wonder if this will become common practice from now on ?
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workerd is missing the scheduler - the thing that allows it to operate across nodes. Durable Object storage are just local sqlite databases.
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.
bummer this expects NFS; this is all a brand new implementation vs what Cloudflare runs internally in production for DOs? I can’t imagine all your workerds share a single global NFS… What would a more realistic workerd with DO support look like?
So happy to see support for running durable objects outside of one provider. Upvoted.
The "durable object" concept has been repeatably demonstrated to be a valuable abstraction.
"Each object is its own SQLite database, addressed by name and replicated to an S3-compatible bucket you own" -- this concept can take you a long way, both in its power and simplicity.
I don't see why not. Somebody once wrote a simple Lambda that spawns a new instance when your spot instance dies so there's always at least one running.
It's super super exciting having an age where many pieces of software can all run with low profiles. Very timely, again, for the unbelievably order of magnitude (and thats 10 to the not 2 to the, for you fellow computer nerds) ish ram crunch we are in. Next up, at some point, ideally we get some v8-like runtimes where we can share libraries across multiple isolates! Separating the shared code from the shared data, so we have multiple instances of the library, seems much harder. (It feels like wasm has some/much promise here and I eagerly await clearer signals that code-sharing while sandboxing is indeed possible)
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.
With apologies to Obama, if you like Cloudflare you can keep your Cloudflare. It looks like celld is not intended to be an exact clone of Cloudflare but is for someone who wants to run a bunch of workers in a single region.
If it were intended to be a direct alternative for the biggest use case, I think it would be more like Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. However, I think it's an alternative for a lot of uses of those two things. For a lot of uses of them, likely most uses, they are overkill.
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.
on the one hand, hosting is hard, you should pay people to host, especially distributed systems.
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.
sure, but s3 is far easier to buy and also far more reliable than typical distributed systems coordinator stuff like etcd/zookeeper/consul. every major cloud offers it, and there’s several decent open source options.
Wonder if this will become common practice from now on ?
time to bring back the dev email distribution list
I recently spun up a simple app for our annual mango tasting event[0] using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects.
It worked really well! Excited to see more options outside of Cloudflare.
[0]https://github.com/jumploops/mangotango
what is the difference between celld and Cloudflare Workers open source version workerd?
https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd
workerd is missing the scheduler - the thing that allows it to operate across nodes. Durable Object storage are just local sqlite databases.
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.
You beat us to it! Been meaning to land this but got distracted.
https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/pull/6780
But honestly I love that there are multiple implementations now.
bummer this expects NFS; this is all a brand new implementation vs what Cloudflare runs internally in production for DOs? I can’t imagine all your workerds share a single global NFS… What would a more realistic workerd with DO support look like?
ah well, we have celld!
Self-hosted and distributed durable objects are a huge step forward for maintaining reliable state across decentralized nodes. Great architecture!
Finally!
So happy to see support for running durable objects outside of one provider. Upvoted.
The "durable object" concept has been repeatably demonstrated to be a valuable abstraction.
"Each object is its own SQLite database, addressed by name and replicated to an S3-compatible bucket you own" -- this concept can take you a long way, both in its power and simplicity.
This concept has been around for a long time.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Check out https://rivet.dev/actors/
I like it! Would be great if I could run locally from the start without configuring an s3 for easy playing/prototyping
Maybe Wrangler is a better way to do that.
All we need is a way to run these on spot instances
I don't see why not. Somebody once wrote a simple Lambda that spawns a new instance when your spot instance dies so there's always at least one running.
Well that couldn't have been any more timely. Did they know? Were they keeping this in a back pocket for the time?
CloudFlare OS: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-os/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996
And yes, celld is isolates! The very lightweight within v8 isolation boundary. Hence the "very low idle cost". The deno team rolled their own new runtime! This one without deno_core! Shout out to this excellent 2022 post: https://deno.com/blog/roll-your-own-javascript-runtime https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819990
It's super super exciting having an age where many pieces of software can all run with low profiles. Very timely, again, for the unbelievably order of magnitude (and thats 10 to the not 2 to the, for you fellow computer nerds) ish ram crunch we are in. Next up, at some point, ideally we get some v8-like runtimes where we can share libraries across multiple isolates! Separating the shared code from the shared data, so we have multiple instances of the library, seems much harder. (It feels like wasm has some/much promise here and I eagerly await clearer signals that code-sharing while sandboxing is indeed possible)
Now you’re getting into the realm of old SOA… where data exchanges are just as stochastic as services on the pipe.
The order of magnitude of this is simply mindblowing.
i donno...i have some doubts about this
cloudflare gives you that instant geo-sync across the world that is hard to beat
with Celld do i need to buy bare metal in major continents
> cloudflare
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.
With apologies to Obama, if you like Cloudflare you can keep your Cloudflare. It looks like celld is not intended to be an exact clone of Cloudflare but is for someone who wants to run a bunch of workers in a single region.
Geo-sync? I'm pretty sure durable objects are tied to the datacenter they are created in.
nothing beats cloudflare's reach they have nodes everywhere
thats hard to beat
If it were intended to be a direct alternative for the biggest use case, I think it would be more like Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. However, I think it's an alternative for a lot of uses of those two things. For a lot of uses of them, likely most uses, they are overkill.
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 one hand, hosting is hard, you should pay people to host, especially distributed systems.
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.
> addressed by name and replicated to an S3-compatible bucket you own; nodes coordinate through that bucket alone, with no control plane or consensus
... but that S3 _is_ the control plane and consensus layer, no? You're just pushing this down the stack to whoever runs that S3 clone.
sure, but s3 is far easier to buy and also far more reliable than typical distributed systems coordinator stuff like etcd/zookeeper/consul. every major cloud offers it, and there’s several decent open source options.