How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard
Database School14 Touko 2025

How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard

Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins me to explain how Durable Objects and D1 work under the hood—and why Cloudflare’s approach to stateful serverless infrastructure is so unique. We get into V8 isolates, replication models, routing strategies, and even upcoming support for containers.

Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=podcast

Follow Josh:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajoshhoward
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshthoward

Follow Aaron:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.

Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15
Database school audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm

Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:37 - What is a Durable Object?
01:43 - Cloudflare’s serverless model and V8 isolates
03:58 - Why stateful serverless matters
05:14 - Durable Objects vs Workers
06:22 - How routing to Durable Objects works
08:01 - What makes them "durable"?
08:51 - Tradeoffs of colocating compute and state
10:58 - Stateless Durable Objects
12:49 - Waking up from sleep and restoring state
16:15 - Durable Object storage: KV and SQLite APIs
18:49 - Relationship between D1, Workers KV, and DOs
20:34 - Performance of local storage writes
21:50 - Storage replication and output gating
24:15 - Lifecycle of a request through a Durable Object
26:46 - Replication strategy and long-term durability
31:25 - Placement logic and sharding strategy
36:35 - Use cases: agents, multiplayer games, chat apps
40:33 - Scaling Durable Objects
41:14 - Globally unique ID generation
43:22 - Named Durable Objects and coordination
46:07 - D1 vs Workers KV vs Durable Objects
47:50 - Outerbase acquisition and DX improvements
49:49 - Querying durable object storage
51:20 - Developer Week highlights and new features
52:44 - Read replicas and sticky sessions
53:49 - Containers and the future of routing
56:47 - Deployment regions and infrastructure expansion
57:43 - Hiring and how to connect with Josh

Jaksot(30)

A million transactions per second: building TigerBeetle with Joran Greef

A million transactions per second: building TigerBeetle with Joran Greef

In this episode, Aaron talks with Joran Greef, CEO and creator of TigerBeetle, the world’s first financial transactions database. Joran takes us on a deep dive of on how TigerBeetle brings double-entr...

23 Loka 20251h 28min

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert

Sam Lambert, my former boss at PlanetScale, talks to me about PlanetScale moving from a MySQL company to now also having a Postgres offering. Sam shares why PlanetScale decided to move to Postgres, ho...

22 Syys 20251h 6min

The database for all your AI needs

The database for all your AI needs

Marcel Kornacker, the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable, a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructur...

16 Syys 20251h

Sharding Postgres without extensions with PgDog founder, Lev Kokotov

Sharding Postgres without extensions with PgDog founder, Lev Kokotov

I chat with Lev Kokotov to talk about building PgDog, an open-source sharding solution for Postgres that sits outside the database. Lev shares the journey from creating PgCat to launching PgDog throug...

19 Elo 202548min

Rewriting SQLite from scratch (yes, really)

Rewriting SQLite from scratch (yes, really)

Want to learn more about SQLite?  Check out my course on SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=yt  In this episode of Database School, I chat with Glauber Costa, CEO of Turso, about their aud...

8 Elo 20251h 17min

Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale

Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale

Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing shard...

1 Heinä 20251h 7min

PlanetScale Metal

PlanetScale Metal

In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal.We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe ...

27 Kesä 202550min

From Prisma Founder to LiveStore: Building local-first apps with Johannes Schickling

From Prisma Founder to LiveStore: Building local-first apps with Johannes Schickling

Johannes Schickling, original founder of Prisma, joins me to talk about LiveStore, his ambitious local-first data layer designed to rethink how we build apps from the data layer up.We dive deep into e...

29 Touko 20251h 31min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
psykopodiaa-podcast
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
adhd-podi
rss-narsisti
rahapuhetta
rss-duodecim-lehti
psykologia
rss-valo-minussa-2
kesken
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
rss-niinku-asia-on
aamukahvilla
rss-koira-haudattuna
jari-sarasvuo-podcast
leveli
rss-uskonto-on-tylsaa
rss-luonnollinen-synnytys-podcast
rss-tietoinen-yhteys-podcast-2