Wasm Breaks Out at KubeCon as Fermyon & Akamai Hit 75M RPS

The News

At KubeCon North America 2025, Fermyon Technologies announced the general availability of Fermyon Wasm Functions, a WebAssembly-based serverless engine built with Akamai that delivers 75 million requests per second, sub-millisecond cold starts, and globally portable deployments across edge, cloud, and on-prem environments. To read more, visit the original press release here.

Analysis

Wasm Hits the Main Stage as Cloud-Native Demands Shift

KubeCon NA 2025 made something very clear: developers are looking for lighter, faster, and more portable execution runtimes as Kubernetes estates grow more distributed and app teams push for edge acceleration.

According to our data, required deployment speeds have doubled for 24.7% of organizations and increased by 50–100% for nearly half of them. Meanwhile, 54.4% of organizations now operate in hybrid environments, forcing teams to rethink how runtime placement works when workloads span data centers, public clouds, and far-edge locations.

With this backdrop, WebAssembly moved from a niche KubeCon topic to a front-and-center architectural conversation, and Fermyon’s announcement with Akamai reflects how far the ecosystem has evolved.

Enterprise-Grade Wasm Serverless Arrives

The Fermyon–Akamai partnership introduces a compelling model for developers:

Cloudflare-like edge latency
Lambda-like global scale
Kubernetes-friendly portability via Spin and CNCF ecosystem tools
A universal engine that runs the same function everywhere

At KubeCon, where operational friction and portability are recurring themes, this resonates. More than 27.5% of teams cite skills gaps and 24% cite complexity as core barriers in cloud-native projects.

Wasm Functions aim to reduce that friction by removing container overhead, minimizing cold start latency, and enabling developers to run the same Wasm module across edge, cloud, and on-prem systems. This is an increasingly popular requirement in regulated and AI-driven applications.

Market Challenges & Insights from the Cloud-Native Community

Cloud-native teams today face several pressures that were echoed throughout KubeCon:

Rising demand for latency-sensitive workloads (media, gaming, commerce)
Growing operational complexity across multiple clusters and clouds
Expanding API and service sprawl, where 50.7% cite performance/scalability concerns in their API lifecycle tooling
Escalating security expectations as CI/CD speeds increase
Cost concerns around origin traffic and high-volume routing

Developers want simplicity, predictability, and performance without sacrificing portability. The portability piece is critical as 19.6% of organizations already operate across four or more clouds, and edge adoption continues to rise.

Fermyon’s Wasm engine aligns with this momentum, offering an ultra-lightweight execution runtime that supports multi-cluster, hybrid, and edge-heavy designs that Kubernetes operators increasingly manage.

How This May Change Developer Patterns After KubeCon

While adoption curves vary, this GA release may influence developer decisions in several ways:

Edge-first patterns may accelerate for workloads like bot mitigation, redirects, dynamic content manipulation, and AI preprocessing.
Hybrid workflows (especially those requiring secure on-prem access) could benefit from Wasm’s sandboxing and portability.
Microservice decomposition may increasingly include Wasm functions for ultra-fast, isolated compute.
Cost-optimization strategies may shift as teams explore lighter runtimes that reduce cloud egress and execution spend.

These shifts won’t happen overnight, but KubeCon attendees repeatedly underscored a desire for simpler, faster, more portable application runtimes. This is precisely the problems Wasm serverless aims to solve.

Looking Ahead

The Kubernetes ecosystem is steadily moving toward agentic, distributed, event-driven architectures, and Wasm may become part of that forward trajectory. With 73.4% of organizations planning to invest further in AI/ML, workloads are becoming more dynamic, latency-sensitive, and globally distributed.

Fermyon’s launch at KubeCon NA 2025 hints that Wasm could play a key role in supporting that shift. The Akamai integration brings global reach, while Spin offers a familiar open-source development experience within CNCF communities.

If Fermyon continues strengthening interoperability with Kubernetes, service meshes, observability platforms, and AI-native workflows, we could see Wasm take a material step forward in the cloud-native mainstream. For now, KubeCon NA 2025 marks the moment serverless WebAssembly officially entered production-grade territory, and developers across the ecosystem are paying attention.

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Paul Nashawaty

Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.

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Samantha Weston

With over 15 years of hands-on experience in operations roles across legal, financial, and technology sectors, Sam Weston brings deep expertise in the systems that power modern enterprises such as ERP, CRM, HCM, CX, and beyond. Her career has spanned the full spectrum of enterprise applications, from optimizing business processes and managing platforms to leading digital transformation initiatives.

Sam has transitioned her expertise into the analyst arena, focusing on enterprise applications and the evolving role they play in business productivity and transformation. She provides independent insights that bridge technology capabilities with business outcomes, helping organizations and vendors alike navigate a changing enterprise software landscape.

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