A Greener, Cost-Effective Cloud with Serverless WebAssembly

6:30-7:00: Food, drinks, and networking

7:00-7:15: Announcements

7:15-8:45: Speaker Talk

An application’s software carbon intensity (SCI) is the sum of its operational emissions and embodied hardware emissions. Today, Serverless or Functions as a Service (FaaS) provide a path towards reducing operational emissions by running event driven applications only as needed.

However, many serverless applications are limited by the underlying unit of compute. For example: Containers provide isolation for applications in a multi-tenant cloud, but they take seconds to start. Similarly. MicroVMs, while more lightweight than traditional virtual machines, can still have slower startup times compared to containers.

An answer to solving this cold-start issue while reducing the app's SCI could be WebAssembly aka Wasm. Wasm modules are just as secure as containers and microVMs with default sandboxing, yet they start almost instantly (in microseconds).In this session, we will discuss why Wasm is the ideal and greenest unit of compute for serverless applications and how you can get started using serverless Wasm with Spin.

Spin is an open source developer tool for building serverless Wasm applications. We will demo running AI inferencing Spin applications and discuss how serverless Wasm also enables better GPU resource sharing. By the end of the talk, you’ll have an understanding of the characteristics that make Wasm a cost-effective and sustainable unit for a greener cloud.

About Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher is a founder of Fermyon. He is one of the original creators of Helm, Brigade, CNAB, OAM, Glide, and Krustlet. He has written or co-written many books, including "Learning Helm" and "Go in Practice." He is a co-creator of the "Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes" series. These days, he works mostly on WebAssembly projects such as Spin, Bindle, and Bartholomew. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He lives in Colorado.