Deno is joining Cloudflare

For years, Deno has been striving to simplify the process of building server software. The team questioned various aspects, such as how modules could be distributed, what security guarantees a JavaScript runtime could provide, and how easily an application could be distributed as a standalone executable. Compatibility with Node.js was a crucial factor in their work, as their users wanted to leverage Deno's improvements while still integrating with the existing JavaScript ecosystem.

The Deno team created a runtime that integrated these capabilities and challenged preconceived notions about JavaScript development. However, the team recognized that their ambitions extended beyond just the runtime. In a previous blog post, the team discussed their vision for computing, storage, and communication working together, with applications not needing to assemble their own infrastructure.

The introduction of Deno Deploy represented another step towards achieving this goal, simplifying the process of running applications. Yet, the team realized that there was still a significant amount of complexity hidden beneath this developer experience. This led to the development of celld, a tool that allows developers to build distributed applications directly, making the system straightforward to operate.

The scaling aspect is built into the programming model itself, rather than requiring each application to assemble its own infrastructure. Cloudflare's Workers programming model and Durable Objects are central to this approach. By joining forces with the Workers and Durable Objects teams at Cloudflare, the Deno team intends to make this programming model the standard for building servers, whether on Cloudflare's network or on users' own infrastructure.

The decision to join Cloudflare also means that the future development efforts will focus on this unified platform rather than maintaining separate runtimes and hosting services. The team acknowledges that this change may impact those who have built on Deno, and they express gratitude to everyone who contributed code, built businesses, reported issues, and trusted the Deno direction.

The team believes that the integration of Durable Objects into celld will be particularly exciting, especially in the context of artificial intelligence applications. Durable Objects offer inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface, making them ideal for agent harnesses.

The team's joint post on the Cloudflare blog delves deeper into this topic. For those building agents at scale and seeking to run them on their own infrastructure, the team encourages them to reach out to ry@cloudflare.com.