This may come as a surprise to some, but when the Deno team released celld in August, we were delighted.

Why a surprise? Well, as it happens, there is a popular theory that suggests we shouldn't be happy.

You see, it is commonly claimed around the Internet that we made Cloudflare Workers work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create "lock-in." The claim goes, software built on Workers is hard to move to other hosting platforms, therefore if you write your app on Workers you are "trapped" on Cloudflare forever. This is especially true of apps that use Durable Objects: they are not just written differently but architected differently. All this is, supposedly, a clever trap: once you are too deep to be able to switch, the rug will somehow be pulled out from under you.

Under this theory, celld is a threat: as an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects, it allows applications built on Workers to seamlessly migrate to other providers.…