The Future of Green Cloud: Serverless WebAssembly on Arm64 Architecture - Kate Goldenring, Fermyon & Aaron Williams, Ampere Computing
The software carbon intensity (SCI) of an application is the sum of its operational and embodied emissions. Serverless provides a path towards reducing operational emissions by running event-driven applications only as needed. However, traditional serverless platforms face limitations due to slow startup times of MicroVMs and containers. WebAssembly (Wasm) addresses this with sub-millisecond startups, lowering SCI. Furthermore, Wasm is platform-agnostic, enabling applications to be built once and run anywhere, continually optimizing for the greenest architecture, such as Arm64. Ampere Arm64 CPUs use 2.8x less power than equivalent x86_64 CPUs, offering lower SCI by improving "performance per watt”. This talk will cover the sustainable features of Wasm and Arm64 and demonstrate deploying serverless Wasm applications on Kubernetes using open-source tools Spin and SpinKube. By the end, you’ll understand how to leverage Wasm and Arm64 for a cost-effective and sustainable cloud.