Should You Care About Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai?
BARCELONA — The release of Fermyon Wasm Functions is a major milestone for WebAssembly, demonstrating its capacity to start, run, and deploy applications in serverless and extending to edge environments the way it was designed to do.
However, for most users, the key takeaway is its impact on serverless applications — enabling significantly lower cold start times, measured in milliseconds, which translates to faster load times and enhanced functionality compared to AWS Lambda.
Fermyon Wasm Functions, launched at the Wasm I/O conference here this week, benefits from WebAssembly’s lightning-fast cold start times and sandboxed isolation when distributed. Combined with Akamai’s networking capabilities, which handle networking overhead, this ensures even faster cold start times, improved load performance, and enhanced functionality for edge functions. It works as a Function as a Service (FaaS) on top of Akamai Connected Cloud, allowing workloads to run with reduced latency across edge deployments.
Showtime
@fermyontech’s @ThorstenHans on Wasm Components at @wasm_io! with Karthik Ganeshram. Yes,advances have been made to compile and deploy to different edge components at lightning speeds through #WebAssembly #wasmio25 @thenewstack pic.twitter.com/dCWmF93YGF
— BC Gain (@bcamerongain), March 27, 2025
According to open source Spin and SpinKube creator Fermyon, Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai represent the fastest edge functions platform in the world. Traditional AWS Lambda or Azure Functions have cold start times ranging from 200–500 milliseconds. In contrast, Fermyon’s WebAssembly-based deployment measures cold starts in mere milliseconds — often less than half a millisecond, according to Fermyon specs.
Fermyon Wasm Functions was put into context during “Wasm Component Composition: A New Era Of Language Interoperability,” a talk that Fermyon’s Thorsten Hans, senior cloud advocate, and engineer Karthik Ganeshram gave at the WASM I/O conference. They described how to:
- Compose applications from multiple Wasm components.
- Build applications using multiple programming languages.
- Use tools like Spin to offload composition for streamlining their DX.
A key advantage of Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai is how it supports global distribution of workloads by default, ensuring availability and performance without the need for developers to choose regions, Hans told me. This service is compared to AWS Lambda, highlighting its advantages such as lower resource usage and better cold start times due to WebAssembly. The key takeaway is that Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai “ensures global availability without the additional costs of region-specific deployment, leveraging similar distribution approaches as Kubernetes,” Hans said.
“If you compare it to a platform like AWS Lambda, which is a similar serverless runtime, those have cold start issues. Running the workload is also much cheaper because WebAssembly is significantly smaller in size,” Hans said. “I think one of the key takeaways is that every app is globally available by default. In all those other offerings, you have to choose and pick regions. You may also have to pay to have your workload deployed into different regions, while with Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai, it is always distributed.”
Wasm Speed Blast
Performance example of load testing execution of 5,000 functions from Ghent, Belgium to Paris, France. (Source: Fermion)
Fermyon co-founder and CEO Matt Butcher was more sanguine about Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai:
“With that combination of networking and compute, we are now outperforming every other compute platform on the planet, beating even Cloudflare Workers. And when every 100 milliseconds of delay causes your site’s visitors to lose interest, this kind of performance boon translates to improving bounce rates and cart abandonment rates.”
—Matt Butcher, Fermyon co-founder and CEO
Akamai’s existing services with which Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai are integrated include Akamai’s Property Manager CDN, Global Traffic Manager (which Hans mentions above), and Linode Object Storage. “That makes it even easier for you to build the kind of edge native applications that will not only outperform cloud native apps, but will do so for less money,” Butcher wrote. “Just compare Akamai’s egress fees with Amazon’s and you’ll see what we mean.”
Fermyon Wasm Functions can support standard edge functions, such as handling CORS headers, hosting static site generator (SSG) content, or managing redirects. However, it especially shines with the class of applications called Edge Native Apps, Butcher wrote. “These are full apps that once upon a time would have been built for the cloud, but that can be run entirely at the edge in a fully distributed manner,” Butcher wrote. “Applications in this class are not just faster and more responsive, but often save bucketloads of money over time. From dynamic content composition to microservices and even on to AI inferencing apps, getting processing power closer to end users is easy with Fermyon Wasm Functions.”
