Cloudflare acquires Deno to advance workerd self-hosting via celld

Cloudflare announced it is acquiring Deno, the company behind the Deno JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, to advance its workerd self-hosting initiative. The deal centers on Deno’s open-source celld project, an implementation of Cloudflare’s Durable Objects pattern, which Cloudflare intends to build upon to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run applications using the Workers programming model.

Under the agreement, Cloudflare will continue supporting the Deno runtime for one year with monthly releases that include bug fixes and security updates. After that period, Cloudflare will stop developing the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and Cloudflare expressed willingness to support community-led maintenance beyond its direct involvement.

Deno and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl characterized the decision as joint and aligned with his evolving priorities. In a public comment, Dahl stated that while Deno is well engineered, it has become constrained by the need to maintain Node compatibility, which limits its ability to introduce transformative abstractions. He emphasized interest in pursuing powerful new models like celld, which relies on object storage for coordination and persistence and represents a distinct approach to server development.

Dahl also highlighted Deno’s permissions system as a standout feature, enabling fine-grained control over file system and network access when running scripts. He contrasted this with Node.js, which introduced a permissions model in version 20.0.0 in April 2023 and declared it stable in version 22.13.0 in January 2025. Node’s model currently lacks support for allow-listing specific network hosts, defaulting to an all-or-nothing networking policy.