WebAssembly Startup Fermyon Releases Spin 1.0 For Serverless WASM

WebAssembly startup Fermyon (previously) has released version 1.0 of its Spin developer tool.

Spin, an open source developer tool and framework for developing serverless applications with WebAssembly, now supports the most popular programming languages including Python, Javascript, Typescript, C#, Rust and Go. Developers can write applications in their preferred language and use Spin to compile to WebAssembly. Spin can also package applications and add them to popular registries such as Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry ready to be used by container-based infrastructure like Kubernetes.

Function-based software execution, often referred to as ‘serverless’, of which AWS Lambda is the most famous example, is quite popular with developers. It provides an abstraction away from infrastructure and lets developers focus on just the code. Yet it is far from perfect.

“The top four frustrations of Lambda developers we spoke to were, in order: developer experience, performance, language support, and operations,” said Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon. Butcher believes WebAssembly, and Fermyon, has a compelling advantage on these dimensions for web applications and microservices.

“Web developers really care about the performance of the backend,” says Butcher. “Even with Lambda cold start times reducing to 200 milliseconds, that’s still kind of slow compared to WebAssembly at just one millisecond.”

WebAssembly promises to provide at least the same and, in many cases, an improved developer experience to the container-based development that is already very popular.

WebAssembly support has recently been added to container runtimes like containerd meaning systems that currently use containers, like Docker and Kubernetes, are able to adopt WebAssembly without making major changes to other parts of the system. While it’s still very early, making WebAssembly relatively easy to add into existing infrastructure reduces barriers to adoption that might otherwise restrict its growth. First-class support for WebAssembly, combined with its pluggable component model, could prove a very interesting way to build applications on top of the existing infrastructure without having to complete change the way things work today.

“We really want to get to the point where we separate out the platform engineering part and the developer experience part so that the developer doesn’t have to act like a platform engineer,” said Butcher. “And, more importantly, the platform engineer doesn’t have to become reliant upon the development team in production scenarios.”

Fermyon has also added a default key-value store to Spin as a handy way for developers to deal with simple state management. While purely ephemeral code with no state to manage is popular and easy to operate, data is where the value of applications lives.

We saw containers rapidly move from a purely stateless mechanism to one that needed storage and backups and all the same data services software on bare metal and inside virtual machines enjoyed. It’s unsurprising to see WebAssembly follow the same path.

Spin also supports external datastores such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and other remotely accessible data storage mechanisms for more robust data storage.

“Ultimately, we think data services should be such that the platform engineering team is the one managing where the database lives, what the connection string is, what kind of pooling you do, and all of that,” says Butcher. The goal is to have developers focus on the data in the application and let WebAssembly’s component model let infrastructure teams make changes without developers needing to know anything about them.

There’s still a lot of work to be done before we see what that might look like, but the pace of development and adoption has markedly increased over the past year. For those at the leading edge of web application development, WebAssembly is definitely something to start exploring.