Rivet Actors – Durable Objects built with Rust, FoundationDB, Isolates
Hello! We posted a Show HN for Rivet last year for our container orchestration project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188659). In that time, a lot has changed that I think HN will find interesting. Rivet is open-source actor infrastructure similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects. Rivet itself already serves millions of MAU in production using our current container runtime – primarily for multiplayer games – and Rivet Actors are a new extension to support actor-like workloads. Rivet Actor's core primitives are RPC, state, and events. Actors are powered by Rust, V8…
In plain words
Rivet Actors is an open-source actor infrastructure platform for building distributed workloads, similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects. Built with Rust, V8 isolates, and FoundationDB, it provides RPC, state management, and event primitives for developers. The platform already powers millions of monthly active users in production, primarily serving multiplayer games. Rivet Actors supports Deno and is designed for applications requiring scalable, stateful actor-based computation.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello! We posted a Show HN for Rivet last year for our container orchestration project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188659). In that time, a lot has changed that I think HN will find interesting. Rivet is open-source actor infrastructure similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects. Rivet itself already serves millions of MAU in production using our current container runtime – primarily for multiplayer games – and Rivet Actors are a new extension to support actor-like workloads. Rivet Actor's core primitives are RPC, state, and events. Actors are powered by Rust, V8 isolates (supports Deno), and FoundationDB. An architecture diagram is available here for [1]. If you're not familiar with FoundationDB, you're overdue to watch Dave Rosenthal's talk [3]. (I firmly believe it's by far the best permissively licensed database; if only it had 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
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