Akamai Allies with Fermyon to Advance Wasm Adoption
Akamai and Fermyon Technologies today formed an alliance that brings WebAssembly (Wasm) software components to a highly distributed cloud computing network.
Fermyon has been at the forefront of providing the infrastructure required to build and deploy Wasm applications using a serverless computing framework. Under the terms of the alliance, that platform will become a service that Akamai is adding to its portfolio.
Ari Weil, vice president of product marketing for Akamai, said that integration will enable application development teams to build and deploy applications running both at the network edge and in the cloud using services provided by Akamai.
At the core of that capability is a Fermyon Wasm Functions engine, which is now integrated with Akamai cloud, networking and storage services, including EdgeWorkers, a platform that enables IT teams to deploy functions written in either JavaScript or now Wasm at the network edge. That capability makes it possible to deploy low-latency applications in minutes that run closer to the point where data is being created, analyzed and stored, noted Weil.
Additionally, cold start times for those applications can be reduced to a fraction of a millisecond, he added.
The overall goal is to reduce the amount of expertise required to build and deploy Wasm applications, at a time when many organizations lack the expertise needed to build applications using a portable binary-code format, along with a corresponding text format for executables, that runs in an isolated sandbox on any platform. Akamai, in the future, plans to add support for additional Wasm platforms, but for now will be focused on delivering services based on the platforms being provided by Ferymon, said Weil.
As an alternative approach to building applications that is being advanced under the auspices of the Bytecode Alliance, Wasm provides an alternative to containers that can run on both Linux and Windows platforms without modification. Wasm applications run faster than most container applications but are also more challenging to build.
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. In addition, Fermyon has donated core elements of its platform to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help spur further adoption.
Ultimately, most IT organizations will find themselves building and deploying Wasm applications alongside software constructed using containers. Rather than there being a wholesale switch, the transition to Wasm is expected to occur gradually.
In the meantime, however, DevOps and platform engineering teams should at the very least prepare to deploy larger numbers of Wasm applications in production environments in the months ahead, especially as more low-latency applications begin to run at the network edge.
The challenge, as always, will be mastering the nuance of yet another software artifact at a time when IT environments, which consist of a wide range of applications written in multiple programming languages, are already overly complex to manage.
