Akamai Acquires Fermyon to Further Advance Wasm Adoption
Akamai Technologies this week acquired Fermyon to add a serverless computing framework for building and deploying Web Assembly (Wasm) applications to its portfolio.
Akamai and Fermyon formed an alliance earlier this year that led to the integration of the Fermyon Wasm Functions engine into Akamai cloud, networking and storage services, including EdgeWorkers, a platform that enables IT teams to deploy functions written in either JavaScript or Wasm at the network edge.
That capability made it possible to deploy low-latency applications in minutes that run closer to the point where data is being created, analyzed and stored. Cold start times for those applications as a result were reduced to a fraction of a millisecond. The two companies last month announced that Fermyon Wasm Functions now scales up to 75 million requests per second across edge and cloud in production environments.
Fermyon is also a maintainer of the Spin Framework, an open source project being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that is designed to make simpler to create serverless Wasm applications.
Art Weil, vice president of product marketing for Akamai, said adding the Fermyon platform to the Akamai portfolio will make it simpler for organizations to build Wasm applications that will be increasingly distributed to the network edge. The Fermyon platform will, for example, make it easier to chain together multiple artificial intelligence (AI) agents to automate workflows at edge, he added.
Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher added that the capability will be especially critical for deploying AI applications using a lightweight Wasm framework that enables inference engines to be deployed closer to the point where queries are being launched. The overall goal is to reduce latency in a way that also serves to reduce the total cost of deploying AI applications, he added.
Akamai has been encouraging application development teams to take advantage of a Managed Container Service that enables organizations to deploy cloud-native applications across a global network that has thousands of points of presence (PoPs). The company also recently launched Akamai Inference Cloud, a platform for distributing AI workloads across both cloud computing environments and the network edge. Akamai has also been using Wasm to combat bots by, for example, redirecting hundreds of thousands of URLs within one millisecond.
As an alternative approach to building applications using a binary-code format that makes it simpler to build applications capable of running on multiple platforms, Wasm continues to be advanced by the Bytecode Alliance as an alternative to containers to build applications that run faster. It’s not clear how many organizations have embraced Wasm as a format for building cloud-native applications, but with support from Microsoft, Docker, Inc., and Amazon, the tooling being provided continues to improve.
The challenge then becomes finding a way to distribute those applications at the level of scale that is being increasingly required in the age of AI, which is an issue that Akamai now views Wasm as a capability that can now be naturally addressed with help from the Fermyon platform.
