Cloudflare is buying the startup co-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, 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.

Deno 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.”

Then 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.

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