Cloudflare has bought Deno, pulling one of the more ambitious challengers to Node.js inside its own walls.
The acquisition was announced this week on Deno's company blog, with Cloudflare taking over the open-source JavaScript and TypeScript runtime that Node.js creator Ryan Dahl built as a do-over of his original project. Deno also makes Deno Deploy, a serverless hosting platform that competes directly with Cloudflare's own Workers product. Neither company has disclosed the purchase price or what happens to Deno's existing commercial offerings. The news quickly became one of the most discussed threads on Hacker News, pulling in hundreds of comments within hours.
Cloudflare now owns both a serverless runtime and the platform most associated with running it outside Node, a combination that gives it more control over the developer experience at the edge. It also removes a potential independent rival to Workers at a moment when edge-computing competition includes Vercel, Netlify, and Fastly. For developers who bet on Deno as the non-Node option, the acquisition raises the usual post-acquisition question: will Deno stay open and independent, or quietly become a Cloudflare-only feature.
Runtimes have a way of outliving their corporate parents' enthusiasm for them, as anyone who built on a platform a bigger company later called redundant can attest.