Cloudflare Acquires Deno: Deploy Shuts Down in Six Months

What happened

Cloudflare announced on October 9 that it is acquiring Deno. Financial terms were not disclosed. Deno had raised $26 million in total, including a Series A led by Sequoia. The entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare.

The immediate backdrop is celld, an open-source implementation of the Workers programming model that Deno released in August, which runs Workers apps and Durable Objects on your own servers. Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, said the celld release delighted his team. Dahl and Belder will lead merging celld's code and ideas into workerd, Cloudflare's open-source runtime, so self-hosted Workers and Durable Objects become a first-class supported option.

Joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.

— Ryan Dahl, co-founder of Deno

Key facts

1. The deal: : Cloudflare acquires Deno for an undisclosed sum; Deno had raised $26 million in total.
2. Deno Deploy: : keeps running for six months, then shuts down; paying customers get migration support to Cloudflare Workers.
3. Deno runtime: : one more year of monthly maintenance releases (bug fixes and security updates), after which the original team ends development; the code stays open source.
4. JSR and rusty_v8: : the JSR registry keeps operating, with infrastructure moving to Cloudflare; rusty_v8 support continues, with integration into workerd planned.