Akamai acquires WebAssembly function-as-a-service startup Fermyon – News

Akamai Technologies Inc. today announced that it has acquired Fermyon Inc., a startup with a function-as-a-service platform based on WebAssembly.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Fermyon previously raised $20 million in funding from Insight Partners, Amplify Partners and angel investors.

WebAssembly, the open-source technology that underpins the company’s platform, provides a virtual sandbox for running applications. It was originally designed to let users run complex programs such as video games in browsers. Today, developers use WebAssembly for a variety of other tasks including powering enterprise applications.

Fermyon’s function-as-a-service platform makes it easier to build and run WebAssembly workloads. It enables developers to write those workloads in several popular programming languages. Additionally, the platform automates several of the configuration tasks usually involved in using WebAssembly.

Fermyon says that its platform can run enterprise workloads more efficiently than other application environments. It provides that efficiency partly by reducing unnecessary hardware usage.

One of the ways developers can reduce an application’s hardware usage is by shutting it down when it’s not actively processing requests. In practice, however, that approach is difficult to implement. Enterprise applications often take so long to shut down and relaunch that there’s no time to repeat the process on a regular basis.

Fermyon’s platform can relaunch an application in 52 milliseconds. That makes it practical to shut down applications when they’re not actively used, which reduces infrastructure costs.

Fermyon sells its platform in three editions. One of those versions is a managed service, Fermyon Wasm Functions, that runs on Akamai’s cloud infrastructure. It enables developers to deploy their software to multiple Akamai data centers and process requests in the facility closest to each user. Reducing the distance that requests have to travel to an application lowers latency.

Following the acquisition, Akamai plans to more closely integrate Fermyon’s platform with its application performance optimization and cybersecurity tools. It also will continue supporting the startup’s open-source projects. Fermyon maintains two Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects called Spin and SpinKube that make it easier to operate WebAssembly environments. 

“Fermyon’s FaaS capabilities, combined with Akamai’s cloud, will make it even easier for developers to innovate and execute lightweight code at the edge,” said Adam Karon, Akamai’s chief operating officer and the general manager of its Cloud Technology Group. “As Akamai continues to expand compute from core data centers to the edge of the internet, this technology will give developers a broad continuum of cloud native and serverless options.”

The acquisition should enable Akamai to compete more effectively with Cloudflare Inc., its top rival in the content delivery network market. The latter company offers a similar WebAssembly-powered service called Cloudflare Workers. In mid-November, it acquired a startup called Replicate Inc. to make the service better at running artificial intelligence workloads.

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