Deno team joins Cloudflare: workerd and celld merge for self-hosting

Cloudflare announced on 9 October 2026 that the entire Deno team was joining the company, with the stated aim of merging two runtimes for Workers and Durable Objects into a single open-source project designed for self-hosting. For anyone running their own infrastructure and wanting to avoid dependence on a single cloud, this closes a gap that has been open for years.\n\n## What changes technically\n\nThe Deno team is joining Cloudflare, and the two are merging workerd and celld. Workerd, the runtime behind Cloudflare Workers, is already distributed as open source, but its support for Durable Objects is limited to a single instance. For anyone wanting the distributed version — objects routed and persisted across multiple machines — a piece was missing.\n\nThat missing piece is celld, the project released by the Deno team in August 2026. According to reports, it's an open-source foundation that runs code compatible with Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects across a self-managed fleet of servers, embedding SQLite in every execution environment and using S3-compatible storage as the coordination mechanism. In the original announcement text, Ryan Dahl describes the goal as a single binary, written in Rust, with object storage as the only external dependency to manage besides the instances themselves.\n\nDahl and Bert Belder will now lead a new effort to make self-hosting workerd a first-class way to build and run applications using the Workers programming model, folding celld's code and ideas into workerd. Anyone who doesn't want to wait can already get started: self-hosting celld or workerd is possible right now.\n\n## What changes for Deno Deploy users\n\nThe move comes at a cost for users of Deno's hosted platform. Deno Deploy, the hosted platform for running Deno applications, will cease operations in roughly six months; paying customers will receive support migrating to Cloudflare Workers. On the runtime side, Deno will only receive bug fixes and security updates for one year, after which official development will stop, though it will remain open source.\n\nFor anyone evaluating a Workers-based infrastructure without relying on Cloudflare's network, now is the time to keep a close eye on how workerd evolves: that's where the work done so far on celld will flow into.