The Challenge

The cost of maintaining a system capable of processing tens of thousands of near-simultaneous requests, but which spends greater than 90 percent of its time in an idle state, cannot be justified. Containerization promised the ability to scale workloads on demand, which includes scaling down when demand is low. Maintaining many pods among a plurality of clusters just so the system doesn’t waste time in the upscaling process contradicts the point of workload containerization.

The Solution

Fermyon produces a platform called SpinKube that leverages WebAssembly (WASM), originally created to execute small elements of bytecode in untrusted web browser environments, as a means of executing small workloads in large quantities in Kubernetes server environments. Because WASM workloads are smaller and easier to maintain, pods can be spun up just-in-time as network demand rises without consuming extensive time in the process. And because WASM consists of pre-compiled bytecode. It can be executed on server platforms powered by Ampere® Altra® without all the multithreading and microcode overhead that other CPUs typically bring to their environments — overhead that would, in less compute-intensive circumstances such as these, be unnecessary anyway.