Cloudflare acquires Deno, the company behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, and its Deno Deploy service will close in six months. The price is undisclosed.
Cloudflare has confirmed the acquisition of Deno, the company behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, in a deal announced this Friday, the amount of which has not been disclosed. The information, reported by ecosistemastartup.com, details that the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare and that the hosting service Deno Deploy will cease operations in six months.
Before the agreement, Deno had raised $26 million from investors throughout its lifetime, with Sequoia leading a Series A of $21 million in 2022, according to the report from Digital Market Reports. The purchase price has not been disclosed by either company.
The central asset of the acquisition is celld, an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects that Deno launched in August. According to Cloudflare's lead engineer, Kenton Varda, celld is designed to be compatible with Workers while remaining self-hostable and scalable. It is a single binary in Rust that runs Workers and Durable Objects across multiple machines, with object storage as its only external dependency.
The announced plan is to merge the code and ideas of celld into workerd, Cloudflare's open-source runtime, so that the Workers programming model works the same on Cloudflare's network or on self-hosted infrastructure. Cloudflare had released workerd as open source in 2022. The technical problem it solves is specific: according to Varda, workerd supports Durable Objects only as a single instance, which is sufficient for local testing but inadequate for production.
Ryan Dahl, co-founder of Deno and previously the creator of Node.js, and co-founder Bert Belder will lead a new effort within Cloudflare to make self-hosting on Workers a viable option.
Current users face a timeline with defined deadlines. The Deno runtime will have monthly bug fixes and security releases for a year; after that, active development will cease, although it will remain open source under the MIT license. Deno Deploy will shut down in six months, and paying customers will receive migration support to Cloudflare Workers. The JSR package registry will continue to operate, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. Cloudflare will maintain support for rusty_v8, the V8 binding, and will work on integrating it with workerd.
Varda addressed the criticism of lock-in: he called it incorrect and argued that workerd already allows migration and that openness was key to winning large customers. He cited Shopify as an example, stating that they required the Workers runtime to be open source before committing to the platform in 2022.
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