Deno's Decline

Summary

Monday 28 Apr 2025 The future of Deno Land Inc. is not looking bright. Their commercial product Deno Deploy claims to be “edge” hosting with “massive global scale”.JavaScript applications on Deno Deploy run server-side logic geographically close to users, offering low latency and great performance.Except that’s a bit of a stretch if we’re being honest.Deno provide a list of regions in their documentation (take a peek if you want spoilers). Between ’23–2024 I gave Deno Deploy a fair shot but my personal experience was negative. I left feedback amongst others’ and moved on.Well, I did keep an eye on one thing…Serverless, anyone?Back in January 2024 a few people noted that Deno Deploy had dropped from 35 regions to just twelve (12) worldwide.For example, Seoul moved to Tokyo, response times went from 8ms to 42ms!@Elefunc on TwitterI would have been happy seeing 42ms to begin with. Anyway, the original 35 wasn’t impressive but twelve is frankly pitiful if I’m being brutally honest, which I am (because it gets worse). I’ve never quite understand what “serverless” means but I think Deno are taking it too literally.To provide an unfair comparison, Cloudflare boast “335 cities in 125+ countries”. I don’t know what a respectable number is for Deno Deploy. Only that it’s between 12 and 335 but I suspect we’ll never find out.Bunny advertise 119 Point of Presences (PoPs) in 77 countries. Bunny has edge scripting using the Deno runtime. Is that their own infrastructure, or Deno’s enterprise offering? Netlify uses Deno for edge functions but their 70+ PoPs is restricted to “High-Performance Edge” (with a “custom” price tag). Now I’m curious, if (big if) Enterprise Deno is doing well, why scale back for us mortals?By December 2024 Deno Deploy dropped from twelve to seven (7) regions. The platform lost Frankfurt, Mumbai, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Texas.All that remained was:TokyoSingaporeLondonNetherlandsSao PaoloNorth VirginiaCaliforniaAt this point it’s worth noting that deno.com is ...