TL;DR
This paper explores using WebAssembly as a lightweight runtime for serverless Function-as-a-Service, showing potential performance benefits and discussing adoption barriers compared to traditional container solutions.
Contribution
It demonstrates the advantages of WebAssembly for serverless functions and analyzes the challenges for its adoption in existing cloud environments.
Findings
WebAssembly can outperform Docker in certain benchmarks.
WebAssembly enables finer-grained pay-as-you-use models.
Adoption barriers include tooling support issues.
Abstract
FaaS (Function as a Service) allows developers to upload and execute code in the cloud without managing servers. FaaS offerings from leading public cloud providers are based on system microVM or application container technologies such as Firecracker or Docker. In this paper, we demonstrate that lightweight high-level runtimes, such as WebAssembly, could offer performance and scaling advantages over existing solutions, and could enable finely-grained pay-as-you-use business models. We compared widely used performance benchmarks between Docker native and WebAssembly implementations of the same algorithms. We also discuss the barriers for WebAssembly adoption in serverless computing, such as the lack of tooling support.
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