Cloudflare acquires Deno: Ryan Dahl’s team joins Workers; the runtime and Deno Deploy will be discontinued

The entire Deno team is moving to Cloudflare to make the Workers model usable outside its network. Deno Deploy will shut down in six months; Dahl highlights the AI agents.

Cloudflare announced on Friday, October 9, the arrival of the entire team of Deno, the start-up founded by Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. Launched in 2018 to fix Node.js's flaws in security and dependency management, Deno had raised about $26 million and competed directly with Cloudflare Workers with its Deno Deploy hosting offer.

Merge Celld and Workerd

The merger builds on Celld, an open-source project released by Deno in August that replicates the programming model of Workers and Durable Objects on a self-hosted infrastructure, with simple object storage as the only dependency. Cloudflare will merge it with Workerd, its own open-source runtime, under the leadership of Ryan Dahl and Bert Belder. Kenton Varda, principal engineer at Cloudflare, acknowledges that the company has never been able to make Workerd truly usable outside of its network, and sees a business interest in it: a model that is available everywhere expands the market in the face of large clouds.

The end of the Deno runtime

Unlike Anthropic's acquisition of Bun at the end of 2025, this one ends product development: the Deno runtime, which remains under MIT license, will only receive one year of monthly patches, Deno Deploy will close in six months with migration assistance, and the JSR registry will come under the umbrella of Cloudflare. Ryan Dahl justifies the choice by AI agents, for which the persistent stateless execution of Durable Objects provides, in his opinion, the right abstractions.