rivet

wever, their scope differs: Rivet Actors are broader and designed for anything stateful & realtime, while Durable Promises seem focused on workflows with complex control flow. Rivet Actors can (and likely will) support workflow-like applications in the future, since state management and rescheduling are already built-in. For a deeper dive, Temporal has a writeup comparing actors and workflows: https://temporal.io/blog/workflows-as-actors-is-it-really-po...

ad a well maintained SQL layer.) Here's where Rivet's architecture gets fun – we don't rely on a traditional orchestrator like Kubernetes or Nomad for our runtime. Instead, our orchestrator is powered by an in-house actor-like workflow engine – similar to how FoundationDB is powered by their own actor library (Flow [4]) internally. It lets us reliably & efficiently build complex logic – like our orchestrator – that would normally be incredibly difficult to build correctly. For example, here's the logic that powers Rivet Actors themselves with complex mechanisms like retry upgrades, retry backoffs, and draining [2]. One of the reasons we built Rivet Actors is because we tried to replace most of our Redis-based realtime infrastructure with Durable Objects. The architecture allowed us to build realtime features much faster & efficiently, but the platform & APIs were needlessly rigid and difficult to use. Our goal is to build an actor-like platform that includes the bells and whistles required for developers to benefit from the actor model without the learning curve of tools like Erlang/OTP, Akka, or Orleans. Rivet Actors provides a few key benefits in flexibility over Durable Objects: - Open-source (Apache 2.0) – built to be self-hosted and deployed on-prem - Provides observability out of the box, no Logpush required - Rivet Actors support the Deno runtime, so NPM & JSR just works - @rivet-gg/actor [5] framework provides RPC, state, and events out of the box for faster bootstrapping; you can modify and deploy it yourself - Supports both V8 isolates & Docker-compatible containers so you can run any software you'd like, like Godot/Unity servers or video transcoding - Also supports TCP & UDP (we run games!) - Provides vanilla HTTP API for easy use with existing apps - Full control over regions There's plenty more that I don't have space to talk about. Give our docs a read if you'd like to learn more [6] or read about internal design decisions [7]. I'll be in the comments answering questions! Cheers, Nathan [1] https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet?tab=readme-ov-file#diagram [2] https://github.com/rivet-gg/rivet/blob/a3db31f3b5c351061d665... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g84y_60VGM [4] https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/flow.html [5] https://jsr.io/@rivet-gg/actor/doc [6] https://rivet.gg/docs [7] https://rivet.gg/docs/internals/design-decisions