The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2022–2024
Rivet pivoted its game infrastructure into open-source durable actors for the AI era
Game-infra startup Rivet launched Rust+FoundationDB 'Actors' in Dec 2024, betting self-hostable durable objects win agents and realtime apps.
Rivet
What the business is
Rivet builds open-source (Apache 2.0) infrastructure for stateful workloads: a managed edge cloud plus a self-hostable Rust engine, originally for multiplayer game servers and, since December 2024, for 'actors' — durable processes with RPC, state, queues, scheduling and realtime events aimed at AI agents and collaborative apps.
How it started
Rivet began as a side project by two founders who had built multiplayer web games together since middle school; in high school one of them built the infrastructure powering Krunker.io (later acquired by FRVR). Tired of rebuilding dedicated-server stacks and DDoS/bot mitigation for each game, they started Rivet, entered closed beta in January 2022, and open-sourced it in August 2023 as a game server management tool for developers 'without any infra experience' — ~99% Rust, running on Nomad, Redis and ClickHouse, already supporting millions of MAU per the founders.
What happened
In 2024 the team rebuilt around a new bet. After trying to replace its Redis-based realtime layer with Cloudflare Durable Objects, the founders concluded the architecture was right but the platform and APIs were 'needlessly rigid and difficult to use'. They rewrote the orchestrator off Nomad onto an in-house actor-like workflow engine, stripped Redis from non-caching paths, replaced Nebula with mTLS, and launched Rivet Actors — RPC, state and events over V8 isolates with FoundationDB persistence — in a 2024-12-20 Show HN that called it open-source actor infrastructure 'similar to Cloudflare's Durable Objects', now also open to non-gaming use. The thread (133 points, 26 comments) debated consistency guarantees, comparisons to Erlang/Akka/Orleans, and scope versus Cloudflare.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Rivet is an open-source infrastructure company that began as a game-server management platform: ~99% Rust, running on Nomad, Redis and ClickHouse, letting multiplayer-game developers deploy dedicated servers 'without any infra experience'. Two founders who built multiplayer web games together since middle school started it as a side project after repeatedly rebuilding server stacks and DDoS/bot mitigation; it entered closed beta in January 2022 and claimed millions of MAU before being open-sourced in August 2023.
The company's second act was a bet about primitives. After trying to replace its Redis-based realtime layer with Cloudflare's Durable Objects, the founders found the architecture compelling but the platform 'needlessly rigid and difficult to use'. So they rewrote their orchestrator off Nomad onto an in-house actor-like workflow engine, stripped Redis from non-caching paths, and launched Rivet Actors: durable processes with RPC, state and events, built on Rust, FoundationDB and V8 isolates (TypeScript/Deno/Node), open-sourced under Apache 2.0 and offered as managed Rivet Cloud.
The 2024-12-20 Show HN — 'Durable Objects built with Rust, FoundationDB, Isolates' — drew 133 points and 26 comments, with the founders arguing that self-hostable, open-source actors with mainstream language support would beat both closed Durable Objects and the learning curve of Erlang/Akka/Orleans. By the 2026-09-05 snapshot the repo had 6.1k stars and the README led with AI agents, collaborative apps and durable execution.
What has to be true
- Game servers taught them the real bottleneck — per-lobby state, realtime sync and matchmaking — which is exactly the actor shape.
- Durable Objects validated the model but not the vendor: rigid APIs and no self-hosting pushed Rivet to build its own equivalent.
- Open source plus TypeScript/Deno/Node attacks the adoption gap that kept Erlang/Akka/Orleans niche for decades.
- Actors span games and AI agents, so the 2024 pivot broadened the market without stranding the existing game runtime users.
What can be applied
Copy the winner's shape, attack its closed seams: Rivet rebuilt Durable Objects' actor model as open-source and self-hostable, betting developers choose the primitive they can own.
Aftermath
As of the 2026-09-05 snapshot, the rivet-gg/rivet repository (now rivet-dev/actors) is actively maintained at 6,090 commits, 6.1k stars and 245 forks; its README now leads with AI agents, collaborative documents and durable execution rather than games, and the platform is offered as an Apache-2.0 self-host (Rust binary or Docker with FoundationDB, Postgres or SQLite) plus a managed Rivet Cloud on a global edge network. No revenue, funding or user figures appear in the sources reviewed; the founders' own posts claimed millions of MAU on the earlier game runtime.
Sources
- Show HN: Rivet – Open-source game server management with Nomad and Rust
- Show HN: Rivet Actors – Durable Objects built with Rust, FoundationDB, Isolates
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