WASM is powering Cloudflare workers in pretty much the fashion the guy describes and it does solve the problem of big latencies for cold starts with Lambda stuff
Instead of spinning up a container on-demand you spin up what is essentially a chrome tab in your V8 instance. Startup time is nil
In terms of solutions looking for a problem, that one seems to have fixed at least one problem for at least one person
This is obviously not true when the application itself can take arbitrary amount of time to initialize.
The overhead of WASM startup is small. But Firecracker is also very quick to start the virtualization; a lean compiled app in Firecracker would start quicker than a bloaty interpreted app in WASM. Both approaches can also freeze a pre-initialized application, and even clone those.
Reality is most "serverless" stuff is slow to start because the application itself is slow to start. WASM isn't going to change that, Enterprises are going to Enterprise. The hype field is just very strong.
WASM has select uses. Cold startups for functions is one of them and glad Cloudflare was able to use it.
I however don't have that problem. Every environment I've been in has banished Lambdas for most things because writing ourselves into knots to keep the lambdas going wasn't worth just having a small container listening to SQS/Kafka was easier and if we needed to scale, we could.
Instead of spinning up a container on-demand you spin up what is essentially a chrome tab in your V8 instance. Startup time is nil
In terms of solutions looking for a problem, that one seems to have fixed at least one problem for at least one person
It's pretty genius