celld: self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects

How it works

The bucket is the coordinator — no membership protocol, no failure detector, no consensus. Ownership is a record in your bucket, claimed with one atomic write. celld's built-in replicator continuously ships each cell's SQLite state to that bucket as LTX segments.<br>YOUR INFRASTRUCTUREYOUR S3 BUCKETSQLite / LTX10,000s of inactive cellscelld on its own VMcelld on its own VMcelld on its own VMeach cell is one sqlite databaseLTXrequests / responsesYOUR INFRASTRUCTURErequestsresponsescelld on its own VMeach cell is one sqlite databaseLTXYOUR S3 BUCKETSQLite / LTX10,000s of inactive cells

ReliabilityDurable Objects is a strong programming model. celld keeps that model while moving placement, state, and operational evidence into infrastructure you choose.<br>orangecloud.report · 12 July 2026 ↗cloudflarestatus.com · 16 July 2026 ↗<br>What changes when you run the model yourself.<br>PLACEMENT<br>No shared machine to lose<br>A cell's identity isn't fused to a machine — ownership is a lease in your bucket, granted by compare-and-swap. Lose a node and another acquires the lease and restores the cell in seconds: your fleet reading your storage, not a vendor restoring a placement you can't see.

BLAST RADIUS<br>A failure domain you choose<br>Your fleet still depends on its machines, network, and bucket provider. What changes is tenancy: no shared Durable Objects scheduler or placement layer can couple your application to another customer's workload.

LEGIBILITY<br>A failure you can read<br>When a cell misbehaves the evidence is on your disk — the ownership record, the SQLite and LTX files, and the logs. You answer “what happened to my cell” with sqlite3 and grep, not a status page that declines to say.

Self-hosting is not automatically more reliable. It makes the failure domain explicit and inspectable: your nodes, your bucket provider, and your operational choices.<br>And to be clear about the tone: we love Cloudflare — this very page is served by a Cloudflare Worker. The Durable Objects model — a single-threaded object with its own storage, addressed by name — is one of the best primitives distributed systems has been handed in years, and that design is Kenton Varda 's and the Cloudflare Workers team's. celld is a love letter to their idea; a primitive this good deserves to run anywhere.

celld=V8+SQLite+LTX<br>a stateful distributed system that rests entirely on S3<br>LTX is Litestream's replica format, from Ben Johnson<br>Read the docs →

Deno Land Inc.