Cloudflare acquires Deno to make Workers 'a mainstream way to build servers'

Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name, in a deal the company says will strengthen its Workers developer platform.

According to Cloudflare principal engineer Kenton Varda, the acquisition will be used to improve the Workers programming model, which lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare's global network. Deno — co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl — recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers that Varda said 'delighted' the Cloudflare team.

Varda pushed back on the idea that Cloudflare built Workers differently from other platforms to create lock-in, arguing that 'being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business.' Dahl said his team is 'joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.'

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia Capital.

Our opinion

This is a quietly significant move for the open-source serverless world. Cloudflare has always pitched Workers on openness rather than lock-in, and buying the team that literally built a rival runtime — then open-sourced an implementation of Workers itself — backs that claim with money.