Deno joins Cloudflare to build self-hosted Workers; Deno Deploy will shut down

Cloudflare and Deno announced on October 9, 2026 that the whole Deno team, led by Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and Deno, is moving to Cloudflare. In a joint post on the Cloudflare blog, Dahl and Kenton Varda of Cloudflare say the goal is to let developers run Workers and Durable Objects on their own infrastructure far more easily, not only on Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare tagged the post as an acquisition, and blogger Simon Willison describes the deal as Cloudflare buying Deno outright. None of the posts give financial terms.

The plan centres on celld, which the Deno team released in August. Dahl describes it as one binary written in Rust whose only outside service dependency is object storage, and Varda says it was designed to be fully compatible with Cloudflare's own Workers and Durable Objects. Cloudflare's runtime, workerd, is already open source, but Varda admits that it runs Durable Objects only as a single instance: enough for local testing, not for scaling. According to Varda, the routing Cloudflare uses in production is not something self-hosters would want, and the company never found the time to build an alternative. Dahl and Bert Belder will now lead an effort to make self-hosted workerd a fully supported option by bringing code and ideas from celld into it. Varda says further announcements will follow in the coming months.

For Deno users the move has direct consequences. Dahl writes that the team will put its future work into the shared platform with Cloudflare's Workers and Durable Objects teams instead of continuing a separate runtime and hosting service. The Deno runtime will get monthly bug-fix and security releases for another year, after which the team stops developing it; the code remains open source and others are invited to continue it. Deno Deploy will keep running for six months and then shut down, and paying customers will get help moving to Cloudflare Workers. JSR stays online and its infrastructure is moving to Cloudflare, while the team keeps supporting rusty_v8 and plans to integrate it into workerd. Dahl calls the shift “a consequential change for people who have built on Deno”.

Varda also uses the post to answer a common criticism that Cloudflare built Workers differently from other platforms to lock customers in. He argues the design differs because Cloudflare considers it better, and says lock-in would actually hurt the company: when it pitched Workers for Platforms to customers such as Shopify in 2022, they would only build on it if the runtime was open source, which is why Cloudflare published workerd, the same code it runs in production. He says some former customers have used workerd to leave Cloudflare, and that “giving people an escape hatch is good business”. He concedes that few people run workerd in production so far, which he puts down to Cloudflare not building out the surrounding services and tooling.

Dahl writes that celld makes scaling part of the programming model itself, so each application no longer has to put that infrastructure together on its own. He sees Durable Objects as well suited to AI agent harnesses because they combine persistent state, WebSockets, low-cost serverless execution and a high-level JavaScript interface. In a Hacker News comment quoted by Willison, Dahl says ending the runtime was a joint decision that he agrees with, and argues that Deno has been pulled into copying how Node.js behaves while “it ultimately is not solving big problems”. Willison calls the end of Deno maintenance the bad news of the announcement. His favourite Deno feature, he writes, is its permissions system, which can limit a script to chosen files, folders and network hosts; he notes that Node.js added a similar model in v20.0.0 in April 2023 but cannot yet allow-list specific hosts.