We launched Cloudflare Workers® in 2017 with a radical vision: code running at the network edge could not only improve performance, but also be easier to deploy and cheaper to run than code running in a single datacenter. That vision means Workers is about more than just edge compute – we’re rethinking how applications are built.

Using a “serverless” approach has allowed us to make deploys dead simple, and using isolate technology has allowed us to deliver serverless more cheaply and without the lengthy cold starts that hold back other providers. We added easy-to-use eventually-consistent edge storage to the platform with Workers KV.

But up until today, it hasn’t been possible to manage state with strong consistency, or to coordinate in real time between multiple clients, entirely on the edge. Thus, these parts of your application still had to be hosted elsewhere.

Durable Objects provide a truly serverless approach to storage and state: consistent, low-latency, distributed, yet effortless to maintain and scale. They also provide an easy way to coordinate between clients, whether it be users in a particular chat room, editors of a particular document, or IoT devices in a particular smart home. Durable Objects are the missing piece in the Workers stack that makes it possible for whole applications to run entirely on the edge, with no centralized “origin” server at all.

Today we are beginning a closed beta of Durable Objects.

Request a beta invite »

What is a “Durable Object”?

I’m going to be honest: naming this product was hard, because it’s not quite like any other cloud technology that is widely-used today. This proverbial bike shed has many layers of paint, but ultimately we settled on “Unique Durable Objects”, or “Durable Objects” for short. Let me explain what they are by breaking that down:

• Objects: Durable Objects are objects in the sense of Object-Oriented Programming. A Durable Object is an instance of a class – literally, a class definition written in JavaScript (or your language of choice). The class has methods which define its public interface. An object is an instance of this class, combining the code with some private state.
• Unique: Each object has a globally-unique identifier. That object exists in only one location in the whole world at a time. Any Worker running anywhere in the world that knows the object’s ID can send messages to it. All those messages end up delivered to the same place.
• Durable: Unlike a normal object in JavaScript, Durable Objects can have persistent state stored on disk. Each object’s durable state is private to it, which means not only that access to storage is fast, but the object can even safely maintain a consistent copy of the state in memory and operate on it with zero latency. The in-memory object will be shut down when idle and recreated later on-demand.

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