Cloudflare said Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name. The company plans to use the deal to improve its Workers programming model and platform, according to Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers. Workers lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare's network. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. The startup recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers. Varda said that release delighted the Cloudflare team and pointed to it as evidence of the company's intentions for the platform.
Varda pushed back on what he described as a popular theory that Cloudflare made Workers work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create lock-in. He said the company instead believes that being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business. The acquisition is meant to further that approach by folding Deno's work into the Workers programming model.
Dahl wrote that his team is joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers. The move pairs the runtime expertise behind Deno with Cloudflare's edge network and its developer platform. For U.S. developers building on Workers, the deal signals continued investment in the model rather than a shift away from it.
Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia. Cloudflare did not say what it paid for the startup. The transaction was announced on Friday.
The acquisition places a well-known open source runtime project inside a major cloud provider, a combination that has drawn scrutiny elsewhere in the industry. Varda's comments sought to frame Cloudflare's platform strategy as open rather than restrictive. Deno's celld project, an open source implementation of Workers, gives developers a way to run the model outside Cloudflare's own network.
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