Cloudflare is buying the startup founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, a longtime competitor that recently built its own open-source version of Cloudflare’s serverless computing platform.The company announced on Friday that the entire team behind Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime Dahl co-founded, is joining Cloudflare. Deno’s standalone runtime and cloud hosting service will be wound down, with its engineers turning their attention to Cloudflare Workers, the serverless computing platform unveiled in 2017 that allows developers to run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Deno’s Cloudflare-inspired projectDeno emerged in 2018 as Dahl’s attempt to address shortcomings in Node.js, particularly around security and dependency management. The startup, which raised around $26 million in funding across two rounds, later launched Deno Deploy, putting it in direct competition with Cloudflare Workers.The companies have also experienced more than a little friction through the years. In 2021, Cloudflare mistakenly blocked Deno’s website and module registry after incorrectly identifying TypeScript files as video content, forcing Deno to move infrastructure elsewhere.“Celld is a love letter to their idea; a primitive this good deserves to run anywhere.”Back in August, Deno introduced Celld, an open-source project that recreated Cloudflare’s Workers and Durable Objects programming model, for developers wanting to run distributed applications on their own infrastructure.Deno made no secret of the inspiration. On the Celld website, the company explicitly credited Cloudflare distinguished engineer Kenton Varda and the Workers team for the underlying design, describing its project as a tribute to their work.“Celld is a love letter to their idea; a primitive this good deserves to run anywhere,” the website states.The admiration, it seems, was mutual. In a joint blog post published on Friday, Varda praised Deno’s expertise in an area where Cloudflare had perhaps struggled.“The Deno team understands how to create a good developer experience around a self-hosted runtime — something we never quite cracked with workerd,” Varda writes.Moreover, he also acknowledges that Cloudflare has struggled to make its open-source Workers runtime practical for developers operating outside its network.“Frankly, we haven’t done a great job of building out the ecosystem of adjacent services and tooling to make it really work.”“Frankly, we haven’t done a great job of building out the ecosystem of adjacent services and tooling to make it really work,” Varda continues . “We’d released the runtime, and then we sort of just hoped the community would step in and start adapting it to every possible environment.”What’s next for Workers and DenoCloudflare now plans to merge Celld with Workerd, its existing open-source runtime, with Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the effort. The aim, ultimately, is to make it easier to build and operate distributed applications using Cloudflare’s programming model on independently managed infrastructure.In a separate blog post published on Friday, Dahl explains that the move would allow the team to concentrate on developing a common platform.“We’ve decided to put our future development work into this shared platform rather than continuing to develop a separate runtime and hosting service,” Dahl writes. “We know this is a consequential change for people who have built on Deno.”“We’ve decided to put our future development work into this shared platform rather than continuing to develop a separate runtime and hosting service. We know this is a consequential change for people who have built on Deno.”Those consequences are not insignificant, either. The Deno runtime will receive monthly maintenance and security updates for another year before development ends entirely. Meanwhile, Deno Deploy will shut down in six months, with migration assistance for paying customers, while the JSR package registry will continue under Cloudflare.Dahl, for his part, also sees AI agents as an important application for the technology, particularly as developers look for simpler ways to manage the infrastructure underpinning them.“The need for better abstractions is especially acute with AI,” Dahl notes. “Durable Objects bring together capabilities that are particularly useful for agent harnesses: inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface.”For Cloudflare, the acquisition brings in an experienced engineering team and technology that addresses a longstanding gap in its Workers platform. For Deno, it marks the end of its independent runtime ambitions, even as the Cloudflare-inspired project it launched just two months ago becomes central to its future.The New Stack has reached out to Cloudflare and Deno for comment, and will update this story when we hear back.The post Cloudflare acquires Node.js creator’s startup that copied its serverless playbook appeared first on The New Stack.