Fermyon Extends Key-Value Storage to Serverless Frameworks
Fermyon Technologies is extending the key-value storage capabilities it provides within its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for building WebAssembly (Wasm) applications to serverless computing frameworks.
Announced at Cloud Native Wasm Day Europe, which is part of the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, the key-value storage service provides free access to 1,000 database records at 1MB each.
The core Spin PaaS environment that Ferymon provides already supports key-value storage to build and deploy stateful applications. That capability is now being made available via the free cloud platform the company hosts.
Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher says the company expects that the ability to access storage via the service should accelerate the rate at which serverless functions can be used to build stateful applications. That’s because the overhead associated with provisioning external NoSQL storage has been eliminated.
Historically, serverless functions have often been limited to stateless applications, but with the arrival of a cloud platform that supports stateful applications, it may soon become simpler for development teams to build more complex applications using a serverless computing framework, noted Butcher.
Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that runs in a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment, and it is starting to gain traction as a method for building a new class of cloud-native applications.
Originally developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code, Wasm is starting to be used to rapidly build lighter-weight applications that can be deployed on any server platform. This is much like how JavaScript evolved to enable applications developed in that programming language to be used on both servers and in browsers. In fact, Wasm may finally fulfill the promise of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere some 25 years after the initial introduction of the Java programming language.
Wasm isn’t necessarily going to replace existing approaches for building cloud-native applications using containers, but it does provide an alternative for developing lighter-weight applications that should run faster. Wasm binaries are created in a way that allows them to start up in milliseconds, while container binaries startup times are typically measured in seconds.
In addition to being faster, Wasm is more secure. Existing approaches to building applications rely on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries. As a result, it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application. Wasm code runs in a sandboxed environment that isolates execution environments and eliminates the ability of malware to laterally move across an application environment.
It’s not clear how frequently Wasm is being used to build applications today, but as advances continue, it will become easier to build server-side applications. The challenge then becomes when to employ Wasm alongside container artifacts that drive the development of most cloud-native applications today.
Regardless of approach, however, the one thing that is certain is that in the months ahead the cloud-native application landscape will become a lot more diverse.
