Modern serverless development has unlocked a new level of developer velocity and made it easier for teams of any size to ship software at any scale. Platforms like AWS Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, and EventBridge offer primitives to build asynchronous business applications that can serve millions of users reliably. However, there is an entire class of multiplayer and realtime applications that cannot be served by stateless architectures, and building such applications requires going all the way back to manual sharding, load balancer, state synchronization, smart routing, and so on.

This talk will explore how we can build stateful services without giving up the ease and speed of serverless technology, and deploy them closest to the users. Using a Cloudflare technology called Durable Objects, we will build a live multiplayer application where users can interact with each other and play a game together in real time. We will explore the tradeoffs of this stateful serverless paradigm, and how it can be incrementally adopted to enhance the user experience of any application.