Fermyon Cloud: Save Your WebAssembly Serverless Data Locally
Fermyon Technologies has added local stateful storage capacity for Fermyon Cloud as well as Spin 1.1, as the WebAssembly startup seeks to improve the developer experience for Wasm.
With the introduction of the Fermyon Cloud Key Value Store, users can now persist non-relational data in a key/value store managed by Fermyon Cloud that remains available for your serverless application. This availability of the data is measured in milliseconds — with no cold starts as the company says — given the low latency that WebAssembly offers for data connections. The Fermyon Cloud Key Value Store is an implementation of Spin’s key/value API, which means you can deploy Spin apps that use key/value data to Fermyon Cloud without changing anything about your application, the company says.
“When designing Fermyon Cloud, we wanted to retain certain stateful mechanisms because there are things that are going to start up, run to completion and stop. So while stateless is really a prerequisite to be able to scale for that, we wanted to give the developer the feeling that they didn’t have to start wiring up their own extra storage service,” Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon Technologies, told The New Stack during the first day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. “Now that Key Value Store is released inside of Fermyon Cloud, the developer is really just making what appears to be regular API calls to store data. It’s deploying into a highly scalable, replicated environment.”
In a blog post, Fermyon communicated the following pain points that Fermyon Cloud users have experience, which includes:
- Having to manage external stateful data services to use from Spin apps introduces additional infrastructure and operational overhead.
- Changes in configuration and code between environments often introduce friction between local development and deploying to production.
So, previously, users working with serverless workloads had to only rely on external services to persist state beyond the lifespan of a single request while Spin lets you use databases you manage (like Redis, PostgreSQL or MySQL).
“So it really feels a lot of this was based on the idea that we want to remove developer friction all along the pipeline, by trying to figure out what are frustrating points for the developer,” Butcher said. “For example, without Fermyon Cloud Key, the developer might have to stand up a local copy of Redis and install it and keep it running. Instead, this step is thus removed by using Fermyon Cloud Key Value Store to allow this to happen.”
Fermyon Technologies offers key-value storage for serverless functions with free 1,000 database records at 1MB each. Spin, the popular open source product that is the easiest way for developers to build WebAssembly serverless apps, added local key-value storage in version 1.0 and now developers can instantly utilize key-value capability in a serverless runtime on Fermyon Cloud, which is also free.
Under the Hood
The Fermyon Cloud Key Value Store is an implementation of Spin’s key/value API, which means you can deploy Spin apps that use key/value data to Fermyon Cloud without changing anything about the application, Fermyon said. The final command once setup is completed is very simple:
The latest feature added is also in support of WebAssembly’s adoption in general, for which Butcher said momentum continues to build. “There has been a growing general awareness of what WebAssembly is, what it can do and what its strengths are,” Butcher said. “We were talking at the beginning of 2023 about how it’s likely that WebAssembly becomes mainstream this year. We’re definitely seeing evidence of that happening already.”
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