Deno team joins Cloudflare, Deno Deploy shuts in six months

Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder and the Deno team are joining Cloudflare, the two companies announced in a joint post on both blogs. Deno Deploy will keep running for six months before shutting down, the Deno runtime will get one more year of monthly bug-fix and security releases before development ends, and JSR, Deno's package registry, will continue with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare.

What is going away, and when

Deno's own post states the two deadlines in plain words. "Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down." A year of runtime maintenance follows: "We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime." Deno says it will stay open source and that others are welcome to maintain it after that window closes.

The post does not name Deno KV, Deno's native key-value store, the Deno Standard Library, the Language Server, Fresh or Subhosting. A team that depends on any of those should treat the announcement as covering the host and the runtime, and watch for a follow-up before deciding.

What is being built instead

The engineering reason behind the move is a merger of two runtimes that already share a shape. Cloudflare's workerd, the open-source Workers runtime it says runs the same code as production, has had one gap: Durable Objects, the small server plus SQLite database that Workers teams use for stateful work, run only as a single instance in workerd and do not scale. Celld, which the Deno team recently released, is a self-hostable implementation of Workers and Durable Objects designed to be, in Dahl's words, "one binary, written in Rust, with object storage as its only external service dependency."

Dahl and Belder will lead the merged effort to make workerd self-hosting "a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model." Kenton Varda, who runs workerd at Cloudflare, writes that "being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business" and acknowledges the Durable Objects scalability gap workerd carried.

The upshot for a Deno Deploy user is that the official path is Cloudflare Workers. Deno says it will provide migration support for paying customers. The two companies state that developers can start self-hosting celld or workerd immediately, and that further announcements will come in the coming months.

Source

The joint announcement is at Deno and on the Cloudflare blog.