devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Nathan Flurry - Rivet - The Future of Serverless is Stateful
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Sep 28, 2025 In this discussion, Nathan Flurry, co-founder of Rivet and a veteran in multiplayer gaming and developer tools, elaborates on Rivet's transformation from a gaming-focused platform to a general-purpose solution for stateful serverless applications. He explains their innovative actor model and how it supports real-time connections and long-running tasks. Nathan also covers Rivet's compatibility with existing infrastructures, its unique observability tools like Rivet Inspector, and ambitions for the future where actors become the standard for stateful computing.
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Actors As Stateful Compute Primitive
- Rivet defines stateful compute as long-running code with durable state and real-time needs.
- Actors are lightweight units that start, stop, sleep, and handle real-time connections and durable state naturally.
Design For Game-Level Performance
- Build your platform fast and low-latency enough for games to ensure broad performance and efficiency.
- Optimize networking, binary encoding, and core components so JavaScript logic remains performant.
Engine+Runners For Flexible Deployment
- Rivet aims to be flexible so users can run runners anywhere and connect to a lightweight engine instead of forcing a full managed runtime.
- That design lowers adoption friction for teams with existing cloud setups like Kubernetes or Railway.