Cloudflare acquires Node.js creator’s startup that copied its serverless playbook
The New Stack Paul Sawers ● Covered by 2 sources
Cloudflare is buying Deno, the Node.js rival built by Ryan Dahl. The runtime is being folded into Workers, and Deno’s standalone path is ending.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
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Cloudflare is bringing Deno inside the tent. The company said on Friday that it is buying the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, and that Deno’s whole team is joining Cloudflare. Deno’s standalone runtime and its cloud hosting service will be wound down as the engineers shift to Cloudflare Workers, the serverless platform Cloudflare launched in 2017.
The deal has a bit of history behind it. Deno started in 2018 as Dahl’s answer to Node.js, with a focus on security and dependency management. It later raised about $26 million across two funding rounds, then moved closer to Cloudflare’s core business by launching Deno Deploy, a direct rival to Workers. The relationship was never exactly warm. In 2021, Cloudflare blocked Deno’s site and module registry by mistake after misreading TypeScript files as video content, and Deno had to move its infrastructure elsewhere.
The irony is that Deno also spent this year borrowing from Cloudflare. In August, it launched Celld, an open-source project that recreated the Workers and Durable Objects programming model for people who wanted to run distributed apps on their own infrastructure. Deno was explicit about the inspiration, even calling Celld “a love letter” to Cloudflare’s idea and crediting Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda and the Workers team on the project page.
Now Cloudflare is effectively adopting that tribute. In a joint blog post, Varda said Deno understood how to build a good developer experience around a self-hosted runtime, something Cloudflare had not fully managed with workerd. He also said Cloudflare had not done enough to build the surrounding ecosystem of services and tools that would make the runtime useful outside its own network. The plan is to merge Celld with workerd, with Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the effort.
Dahl says the combined project should stay open source, likely under the Apache 2.0 license Celld already uses. He says developers should be able to run it with just an industry-standard object storage bucket for coordination and storage, while using the same API as Cloudflare’s own platform. Deno’s standalone runtime will get monthly maintenance and security updates for another year, Deno Deploy will shut down in six months, and the JSR registry will continue under Cloudflare. The timing also says something about where this part of software is heading: even JavaScript runtimes are getting pulled into the AI and serverless gravity well.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when the open-source story gets good enough to become the product roadmap. Cloudflare gets a talented team and a cleaner answer to its self-hosting problem; Deno gets absorbed right after building a near-copy of the thing it admired. The real tell is that the winning move in infrastructure still looks like open source, because nobody trusts a black box with the plumbing.
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