Deno joins Cloudflare, giving Deno Deploy six months and the Deno runtime one more year

The whole Deno team is joining Cloudflare, Ryan Dahl announced on October 9. The move ends Deno as a separate business: Deno Deploy, which only became generally available in February, will shut down after six months, and Deno's own work on the runtime will stop after one more year of maintenance releases.

The stated goal is not to grow Deno inside Cloudflare. It is to make Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects easy to run on your own servers, which also gives customers a ready way to leave Cloudflare.

What happens to each Deno product

According to Dahl's post on the Deno blog, the runtime gets monthly bug fix and security releases for one year. After that, the team "will end our development of the Deno runtime." Deno stays open source, and Dahl invites others to keep developing it.

Deno Deploy keeps running for six months before shutting down. Paying customers who move to Cloudflare Workers will get migration help; the post does not give an exact shutdown date or say what happens to free users.

JSR, the JavaScript package registry Deno launched, will keep operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. Cloudflare will also keep supporting rusty_v8, Deno's Rust bindings to the V8 engine. Deno KV and the Fresh web framework are not mentioned in either announcement. No price or deal terms were disclosed.

The piece Cloudflare could not build itself

The joint Cloudflare post, written by Dahl and Cloudflare engineer Kenton Varda, explains why this is happening now. In August the Deno team released celld, a single Rust binary that runs Durable Objects on your own machines and needs only an object storage bucket as an outside dependency.

Cloudflare had been trying to solve the same problem. Its open source runtime, workerd, supports Durable Objects only as a single instance, which is fine for testing but does not scale. Varda writes that the routing Cloudflare uses in production is too heavy for self-hosters, and that an attempt to fix this in the spring "didn't work." Code and ideas from celld will now be merged into workerd, with Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the effort.

Selling the exit

Varda's argument is that a credible way out makes customers more willing to commit. He recounts that Shopify and other prospects for Workers for Platforms wanted an open source runtime before signing on, which is why workerd was released, and he acknowledges that some former customers have since moved off Cloudflare using it.

Cloudflare also admits it was "perhaps" naive to expect the community to turn workerd into a self-hosting platform on its own. Both posts promise more announcements in the coming months, without dates.

For Deno users, the clock is the concrete part: roughly six months to move anything running on Deno Deploy, and twelve months of runtime updates before the project depends on outside maintainers.