Cloudflare acquires Deno to improve its Workers programming model

Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime also named Deno. The acquisition aims to enhance Cloudflare's Workers programming model and platform, which enables customers to develop and execute software on Cloudflare's network. Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, stated that this move would "delight" the Cloudflare team. Deno, co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, recently unveiled celld, an open-source implementation of Workers, which impressed Varda.

Varda challenged the notion that Cloudflare made Workers diverge from other cloud platforms to foster "lock-in." Instead, the company believes that being open-source and providing an escape route is advantageous. Ryan Dahl, Deno's co-founder, expressed his excitement about joining Cloudflare to promote the Workers programming model as a mainstream method for building servers. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Deno had secured $26 million in total funding, with a Series A round led by Sequoia.