WebAssembly as a Serverless Runtime

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The New Stack had an interesting conversation with Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon Technologies. In this half hour interview, Matt talks about WebAssembly as a serverless runtime and how it offers advantages like fast startup times and what I would call a binary interface between supported languages. WebAssembly’s Component Model lets supported programming languages publish their imported and exported capabilities in a standardized way. That means different supported programming languages can talk to one another and interoperate within WebAssembly. Matt also says that WebAssembly and containers complement each other in the cloud and offer different strengths to different use cases.

For me personally, this reminds me of P/Invoke which let PowerShell talk to the Windows API. That was very useful for Windows functions which had not been recreated in later .NET languages. Hopefully, the Component Model from WebAssembly will let developers access tools across programming languages.

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I thought this recent article from Matt Butcher (co-founder and CEO of Fermyon) was interesting. It gives a good overview of WebAssembly. And, it briefly introduces SpinKube: the open source project for running serverless WebAssembly on top of Kubernetes.

A Wasm runtime can cold-start in under one millisecond. This means Wasm functions can scale from zero instances to hundreds of thousands of instances in the blink of an eye — and then back down to zero again just as fast.

Those who want to go all-in on serverless, porting their Lambda and Azure Functions code to Kubernetes, can do so quickly and easily with SpinKube.

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