Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the open-source JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Node.js founder Ryan Dahl. However, the acquisition comes with a major change: Deno’s core team will stop developing the runtime in 2027, after one final year of maintenance and security updates.
The announcement confirms the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare to work on its Workers platform and related technologies. Instead of developing Deno as a separate runtime, the developers will focus on making Cloudflare’s application platform easier to run, including on privately operated infrastructure.
Built using Rust, the V8 JavaScript engine, and Tokio, Deno offers built-in TypeScript support, a security model that restricts access to system resources by default, and integrated tools for testing, formatting, and managing dependencies. Now, however, its original developers are taking a different direction.
According to Dahl, the team will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that period, ending in October 2027, the team will cease development work on the runtime.
Importantly, this doesn’t mean Deno itself will disappear. The project will remain open source, and other developers are welcome to continue maintaining and improving it. Whether the community will take over its development remains to be seen.
The acquisition also affects Deno’s commercial services. Deno Deploy, the company’s serverless application hosting platform, will operate for another six months before shutting down around April 2027. Paying customers will receive assistance migrating their applications to Cloudflare Workers.
Moreover, JSR, the JavaScript and TypeScript package registry developed by the Deno team, will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. The team has also committed to maintaining rusty_v8, the Rust bindings for Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, with plans to integrate the project into Cloudflare’s workerd runtime.
So, why is Cloudflare interested in Deno if the runtime itself is being phased out of active development by its creators?
The answer lies primarily in celld, a project developed by Dahl to simplify running distributed applications across multiple servers. It builds on the Cloudflare Workers programming model and Durable Objects, which combine application logic with persistent data storage.
Cloudflare provides an open-source runtime called workerd, which powers its Workers platform. Running the same infrastructure independently has limitations, especially when applications need to distribute data and workloads across multiple machines.
This is where celld comes in. The project was designed to make that kind of distributed infrastructure easier to deploy and operate without relying on Cloudflare’s own network.
Cloudflare now plans to combine the work behind celld and workerd, with Ryan Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the effort. The goal is to make self-hosting Workers and Durable Objects an officially supported option, allowing developers to run applications using the same programming model on Cloudflare’s network or their own servers.
For Cloudflare, this could make its development platform more attractive to organizations that prefer to control their infrastructure rather than depend entirely on a cloud provider. The company says more announcements about the combined work are planned in the coming months.
For existing Deno users, the immediate concern is the runtime’s future. The departure of the original development team raises questions about long-term support, compatibility, and future releases. Unless new maintainers step forward, Deno could remain functional without substantial improvements.
For additional details, visit Deno’s official announcement and Cloudflare’s announcement.
