WebAssembly + OpenFaas, the Universal Runtime for Serverless Functions
Serverless Practitioner Summit 2021
I’m the founder and CEO of Okteto, where we’re busy re-imagining the developer experience for cloud native applications.
Before Okteto, I built enterprise chat products at Atlassian, application lifecycle management tools at Elasticbox (now part of Centurylink) and cloud services at Microsoft Azure.
WebAssembly was initially created as a sandbox for the Web. It was designed to be lightweight, portable, and compatible with most programming languages. Given these characteristics, it's no surprise that a lot of people are starting to take it outside the browser and into the realm of desktop and cloud applications.
In this talk, I discuss why WebAssembly is perfectly suited as a runtime for serverless functions. I talk about prior art, how WebAssembly can be used to build serverless functions, how it compares with Docker and other runtimes, and how we can leverage it to make our functions more portable and faster to start.
I finish with a demo of how we can build functions in different languages, compile them to portable WebAssembly binaries and then use OpenFaaS to manage and deploy them to Kubernetes, with the help of Krustlet.
The code for the demo is available on GitHub, if you want to try it out yourself.
