12 OCT 2026 — Cloudflare is acquiring Deno, the company behind the Deno JavaScript and TypeScript runtime. Development of the runtime will stop after one more year of bug fixes and security updates. Deno Deploy, the company's hosting service, will shut down in six months.
Both companies announced the deal on 9 October. The whole Deno team is joining Cloudflare to work on its Workers platform. The financial terms were not disclosed, TechCrunch reported, and Deno had raised a total of US$26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.
What Deno users need to know
Ryan Dahl, who created Node.js before he started Deno, laid out the schedule in a post on the Deno blog. The Deno runtime will get monthly releases with bug fixes and security updates for another year. "After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime," he wrote. It will stay open source, and Dahl wrote that others are welcome to continue developing it.
Deno Deploy will keep running for six months before it closes, with migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. JSR, the JavaScript package registry Deno runs, will continue, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. "We know this is a consequential change for people who have built on Deno," Dahl wrote.
Why Cloudflare wanted the team
The deal is about celld, a project Deno released in August. It is an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects, Cloudflare's model for running code and storing state at the edge of its network, and it is designed for people to run on their own servers. Dahl described it as "one binary, written in Rust, with object storage as its only external service dependency".
Cloudflare already publishes its own Workers runtime, workerd, as open source. Kenton Varda, the principal engineer for Workers, wrote in Cloudflare's joint post that it has always had "one big gap": workerd runs Durable Objects only as a single instance, which is fine for testing but cannot scale. Cloudflare had wanted to fix that for years and had not found the time. "I actually made an attempt last spring, but, embarrassingly, it didn't work," he wrote.
The lock-in argument
Varda used the announcement to answer a common criticism, that Cloudflare made Workers different from other cloud platforms to trap customers. He wrote that some large customers, including Shopify, would not have signed up unless the runtime was open source. Some former customers left by using workerd, he said, and "being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business."
The argument has an awkward edge. Under that very theory, Varda noted, celld was a threat, because it let applications built for Workers move to other providers. Its developers now work for Cloudflare.
What happens to celld
Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder will lead an effort to make self-hosting workerd "a first-class supported way" to run Workers applications, merging code and ideas from celld back into it. Dahl tied the plan to AI, writing that Durable Objects suit "agent harnesses" because they combine cheap serverless execution, persistent state and WebSockets.
The question for developers
The promise is that code written for Workers will run on Cloudflare or on a company's own hardware. Whether that holds will depend on how far Cloudflare takes self-hosting now that it controls both implementations. Teams running Deno in production have a year to decide where to go, and Deno Deploy customers have half that.
