# Rivet > Open-source infrastructure for long-lived, in-memory processes called Actors with built-in state persistence and realtime capabilities. Rivet is an open-source infrastructure platform designed for building stateful backends using long-lived, in-memory processes called Actors. It solves the limitations of traditional HTTP, databases, and queues by combining compute and state in the same place, enabling sub-millisecond read/write latency and infinite horizontal scaling. Rivet is fully self-hostable and released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. - **Actor Model Architecture** provides isolated servers that hold their own data in memory, eliminating the need for constant database round-trips and enabling zero-latency state access directly within your application code. - **In-Memory State Persistence** automatically persists state to disk and loads it into memory when actors wake up, with no database queries needed and automatic change detection for seamless persistence and replication. - **Built-in Realtime Support** includes WebSockets out of the box, allowing you to broadcast updates to all connected clients with a single line of code without additional infrastructure or pub/sub layers. - **Automatic Sleep and Wake** enables actors to automatically sleep when idle to save costs and wake instantly on demand, with WebSocket connections maintained even while sleeping. - **Multi-Region Deployment** allows deploying actors across regions worldwide with compute and state living together at the edge for ultra-low latency responses. - **Stack Agnostic Integration** works with existing infrastructure including Vercel, Cloudflare, Railway, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and bare metal, plus frameworks like React, Next.js, Hono, Express, and runtimes like Node.js, Bun, and Deno. - **Built-In Observability** provides live state inspection, network monitoring, event tracking, and REPL debugging tools that work seamlessly from local development to production. To get started, install RivetKit and define your actor with state and actions. Deploy using Docker or the Rivet Cloud managed platform. Connect clients using the JavaScript SDK or React hooks for real-time applications like chat rooms, AI agents, collaborative documents, and multiplayer games. ## Features - Actor model for stateful backends - In-memory state persistence - Sub-millisecond read/write latency - Built-in WebSocket support - Automatic sleep and wake - Multi-region deployment - Horizontal scaling - Live state inspection - Network inspector - Event monitoring - REPL debugging - Type-safe RPC - Realtime broadcasting - Automatic failover - Self-hostable - Apache 2.0 open-source license ## Integrations Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Railway, Kubernetes, AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run, Hetzner, React, Next.js, Svelte, Hono, Express, Elysia, tRPC, Node.js, Bun, Deno, Vitest, Pino, AI SDK, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, TypeDoc, FoundationDB, PostgreSQL ## Platforms ANDROID, IOS, WEB, API, DEVELOPER_SDK ## Pricing Open Source, Free tier available ## Links - Website: https://www.rivet.dev - Documentation: https://www.rivet.dev/docs/ - Repository: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet - EveryDev.ai: https://www.everydev.ai/tools/rivet