Cloudflare announced it has acquired PartyKit, the “open source platform for deploying real-time, collaborative, multiplayer applications.”

As one of the world’s leading content delivery networks (CDNs), Cloudflare is acutely aware of the challenges involved in creating real-time applications for the web, many of which are difficult for developers to tackle.

The company sees PartyKit as a way to lower the barrier to entry, according to a company blog post. PartyKit began as a way of building on Cloudflare’s Durable Objects approach to stateful serverless capabilities. The company says PartyKit puts building with real-time components within reach of development teams of all sizes, rather than being restricted to only the largest organizations.

Unlike conventional approaches that rely on external databases to maintain state, thereby complicating scalability and increasing costs, PartyKit leverages Cloudflare’s Durable Objects to offer a seamless model where stateful serverless functions can operate as if they were running on a single machine, maintaining state across requests. This innovation not only simplifies development but also opens up a broader range of use cases, including real-time computing, collaborative editing, and multiplayer gaming, by allowing thousands of these “machines” to be spun up globally, each maintaining its own state. PartyKit aims to be a complement to traditional serverless computing, providing a more intuitive and efficient method for developing applications that require stateful behavior, thereby marking the “next evolution” of serverless computing.

Cloudflare says existing users can expect their projects “to continue working as expected,” with more features coming in the future:

Users can expect their existing projects to continue working as expected. We will be adding more features to the platform, including the ability to create and use PartyKit projects inside existing Workers and Pages projects. There will be no extra charges to use PartyKit for commercial purposes, other than the standard usage charges for Cloudflare Workers and other services. Further, we’re going to expand the roadmap to begin working on integrations with popular frameworks and libraries, such as React, Vue, and Angular. We’re deeply committed to executing on the PartyKit vision and roadmap, and we’re excited to see what you build with it.

The company ended by welcoming the PartyKit team and promising to help ‘craft the foundation for next-gen internet apps:

The acquisition of PartyKit by Cloudflare isn’t just a milestone for our two teams; it’s a leap forward for developers everywhere. Together, we’re not just building tools; we’re crafting the foundation for the next generation of Internet applications. The future of serverless is stateful, and with PartyKit’s expertise now part of our arsenal, we’re more ready than ever to make that future a reality.

Welcome to the Cloudflare team, PartyKit. Look forward to building something remarkable together.