Cloudflare buys Deno to strengthen its edge computing platform
The infrastructure company has acquired the startup behind the Deno runtime, signaling a push to make its Workers platform more open and competitive with other cloud services.
Cloudflare has completed its acquisition of Deno, the company that develops the Deno programming runtime. The deal aims to enhance Cloudflare's Workers platform, which lets developers deploy and execute applications across Cloudflare's global network infrastructure.
Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, explained the strategic rationale behind the move. He highlighted Deno's recent launch of celld, an open source implementation of Workers, which he said "delighted" Cloudflare's team. Varda used the acquisition to address concerns about vendor lock-in, stating that contrary to "a popular theory" that Cloudflare "made Cloudflare Workers work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create 'lock-in,'" the company believes "being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business."
Deno was created by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the original developer of Node.js. Dahl commented on the acquisition, writing that his team is "joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers."
Cloudflare did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Deno had previously raised $26 million in total funding, with a Series A round led by Sequoia.