● Covered by 4 sources · 5 reportsMedium impact4 neutral1 positive
Cloudflare Acquires Deno Team, Integrating Runtime Development into Cloudflare Workers
Key points
- Cloudflare acquired the entire Deno team.
- Deno's standalone runtime and cloud hosting service will be discontinued.
- The Deno team will now focus on Cloudflare Workers development.
- Deno previously released celld, an open-source Workers implementation.
- Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
- Cloudflare's Kenton Varda is principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers.
- Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl.
- Deno raised $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.
- Deno's JSR will continue operating on Cloudflare's infrastructure.
- The Deno team will integrate Deno's celld into Cloudflare's workerd project.
- The Deno runtime will wind down its investment over the next year.
- Ryan Dahl announced the Deno team is joining Cloudflare last week.
- The announcement came two years to the day after Deno 2 shipped.
- Bun joined Anthropic ten months ago.
Cloudflare Acquires Deno Team
Cloudflare announced the acquisition of the entire Deno team, integrating their work into Cloudflare's serverless computing platform, Cloudflare Workers. This move follows Deno's recent release of celld, an open-source implementation of Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects.
The Deno team, co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, will cease development on the standalone Deno runtime and its cloud hosting service, Deno Deploy. Their focus will shift to enhancing Cloudflare Workers, a platform unveiled in 2017 that enables developers to run applications without managing underlying infrastructure. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Deno's Evolution and Competition
Deno emerged in 2018 as an attempt to address perceived shortcomings in Node.js, particularly concerning security and dependency management. The startup raised approximately $26 million in funding across two rounds.
Deno later launched Deno Deploy, a cloud hosting service that placed it in direct competition with Cloudflare Workers. The companies have also had past friction, including an incident in 2021 where Cloudflare mistakenly blocked Deno's website and module registry.
Addressing Platform Lock-in Concerns
Cloudflare acknowledged a common theory that Cloudflare Workers' unique design creates platform lock-in, especially for applications using Durable Objects, making migration to other platforms difficult. Under this theory, Deno's celld, as an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects, was seen as a way to allow applications built on Workers to migrate to other providers.
Cloudflare stated that Workers was designed differently because it offers a better way to build web applications, not to create lock-in. The acquisition of the Deno team, particularly after their work on celld, is presented as a development that aligns with Cloudflare's goals for its platform.
Future of Deno Runtime
While the Deno team joins Cloudflare, development on the Deno runtime will cease after one year of bug fixes and security updates. The team's ambition has always extended beyond just the runtime, aiming for a model where compute, storage, and communication work together without each application assembling its own infrastructure. Building and operating Deno Deploy highlighted the remaining complexity beneath the developer experience, which the team now aims to simplify within Cloudflare.
Updates
- Deno's JSR will continue operating on Cloudflare's infrastructure.
- The Deno team will integrate Deno's celld into Cloudflare's workerd project.
- The Deno runtime will wind down its investment over the next year.
- Ryan Dahl announced the Deno team is joining Cloudflare last week.
- The announcement came two years to the day after Deno 2 shipped.
- Bun joined Anthropic ten months ago.
- Cloudflare's Kenton Varda is principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers.
- Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl.
- Deno raised $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.
✨ This summary was generated by AI from the outlets' reporting listed below. It is not independently verified and may contain errors — check the original sources. How BrevFeed works →
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Primary sources
GitHub littledivy/durable-git GitHub cloudflare/workerd CVE CVE-2023-503877.5 HIGH GitHub denoland/deno GitHub denoland/rusty_v8 GitHub oven-sh/bunHow outlets covered it
The Deno team is joining Cloudflare, leading to the Deno runtime winding down its investment over the next year. Deno's JSR will continue operating on Cloudflare's infrastructure, and the team will integrate Deno's `celld` into Cloudflare's `workerd` project. This move signifies a shift in the JavaScript runtime ecosystem, as Deno's original vision influenced Node.js development despite Deno not achieving widespread production adoption.
Cloudflare acquired Deno, the startup behind the Deno programming runtime, to improve its Workers programming model and platform. This acquisition aims to make the Workers programming model a mainstream method for building servers.
Cloudflare acquired Deno, the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, integrating the Deno team into Cloudflare Workers. Deno's standalone runtime and cloud hosting service will be discontinued, with its engineers focusing on Cloudflare's serverless computing platform.
Cloudflare acquired the entire Deno team, integrating their work into Cloudflare's Workers and Durable Objects platforms. This acquisition means Deno runtime development will cease after one year of bug fixes and security updates, as the team shifts focus to Cloudflare's distributed application model.
The Deno team has joined Cloudflare, following their release of celld, an open-source implementation of Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. This move provides an alternative runtime for Workers applications, addressing concerns about platform lock-in.