Deno is joining Cloudflare
Deno’s creators are joining Cloudflare to merge their open-source runtime with Cloudflare’s serverless platform, aiming to simplify distributed application development across any infrastructure.
Ryan Dahl and Kenton Varda announced the Deno team’s move to Cloudflare to combine Deno’s runtime with Cloudflare’s serverless tools, including Workers and Durable Objects. The goal is to let developers use the same programming model for self-hosted and cloud-hosted applications, reducing the complexity of building distributed systems. By merging Deno’s workerd and the Deno team’s celld project, Cloudflare seeks to make it easier to deploy scalable applications without managing separate infrastructure stacks.
Dahl reflected on Node.js’s early promise of simplifying asynchronous programming, noting that while Deno improved JavaScript development, it didn’t address core challenges like distributed state and autoscaling. The breakthrough came with Cloudflare’s Durable Objects, which provide a distributed singleton model with built-in SQLite storage, enabling applications to scale naturally by sharding data and connections across machines.
To extend this model beyond Cloudflare’s network, Dahl created celld, an open-source Rust-based runtime designed to run Durable Objects and related services with minimal external dependencies. Celld uses a single binary and object storage, allowing developers to deploy distributed applications on their own infrastructure while maintaining the simplicity of Workers’ programming model.
The merger aims to make the Workers programming model a standard for building servers, whether hosted on Cloudflare or elsewhere. By open-sourcing workerd and integrating celld, Cloudflare and Deno seek to remove barriers to adopting distributed computing, addressing concerns about vendor lock-in while delivering a more flexible and powerful way to develop cloud software.