By ByteBot
Akamai just eliminated the serverless cold start penalty—one of cloud computing’s most persistent performance bottlenecks. The company’s new WebAssembly-powered edge platform delivers cold starts under 0.5 milliseconds, making it 1000x faster than traditional Docker-based serverless functions and 10x faster than existing edge competitors like Cloudflare Workers. This breakthrough opens serverless architecture to real-time, latency-critical applications that were previously impossible: AR/VR, multiplayer gaming, autonomous systems, and medical IoT devices.
The Numbers Back It Up
Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai Cloud reached general availability in November 2025, and the performance claims aren’t marketing fluff. The platform scales to 75 million requests per second in production with 99.9% reliability—the only edge serverless platform to offer such a guarantee. Cold starts clock in under 0.5 milliseconds, obliterating AWS Lambda’s typical 100-500ms latency and making Cloudflare Workers’ 5ms cold starts look sluggish.
This isn’t incremental improvement. Traditional serverless functions have suffered from the cold start tax since AWS Lambda launched in 2014. Every invocation after idle time meant spinning up containers, booting runtimes, and loading code—death by a thousand milliseconds for latency-sensitive applications. WebAssembly just killed that tax.
How WebAssembly Enables the Impossible
The secret is WebAssembly’s compilation model. Traditional serverless architectures run containers: Docker images that need OS-level resources, runtime initialization, and function loading. That overhead adds up to 100-500ms for cloud functions and 5-50ms even for optimized edge platforms.
WebAssembly takes a different path. Pre-compiled bytecode executes instantly without container overhead. Research shows WebAssembly runtimes are at least 10x faster than Docker for cold starts, with some implementations achieving 1000x improvements. AoT-compiled Wasm images are up to 30x smaller than containers, reducing cold-start latency by up to 16%.
Akamai’s partnership with Fermyon leverages the Wasmtime runtime, which excels at lightweight functions. The security model is equally impressive: WebAssembly’s sandbox executes code with strong isolation using capabilities-based access control, specifying exactly which hosts, databases, and files an app can touch. No VM overhead, no container bloat, just instant execution with enterprise-grade security.
Use Cases That Were Impossible Yesterday
Sub-millisecond cold starts unlock applications serverless couldn’t touch before. Multiplayer online games need ultra-low latency for seamless player experiences—100ms cold starts were a non-starter. Medical IoT devices processing emergency response data can’t afford serverless lag when lives are on the line. Autonomous vehicles making split-second decisions can’t wait for a Lambda function to warm up.
Now these use cases are viable with serverless. AR and VR applications requiring instant responses can run on edge functions. Real-time edge analytics can process data without cloud roundtrips. Smart city infrastructure managing traffic flow and energy consumption can react in real-time. The serverless market is projected to hit $52.13 billion by 2030, and sub-1ms cold starts just expanded the addressable use cases dramatically.
Developer Experience Without Compromise
Akamai didn’t sacrifice developer experience for performance. The platform supports JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python, .NET, and more through the open source Spin framework—no proprietary lock-in. Write a function in any supported language, deploy once, and it’s available in all edge regions within seconds. No Kubernetes configuration, no Docker files, no manual region selection.
Integration with Akamai’s ecosystem is seamless: CDN distribution, EdgeWorkers for custom logic, object storage, and even GPU compute for AI workloads. It’s the serverless promise delivered without the cold start penalty developers have tolerated for a decade.
Competitive Pressure Mounts
AWS Lambda’s 100ms cold starts suddenly look prehistoric. Cloudflare Workers pioneered fast edge functions at 5ms cold starts—Akamai just made that 10x slower by comparison. The competitive landscape is shifting fast:
- Akamai Fermyon: Sub-0.5ms cold starts, 75M RPS, 99.9% reliability, 7+ languages
- Cloudflare Workers: ~5ms cold starts, high scale, no reliability guarantee, JS/TS/Wasm
- Vercel Edge: 10-50ms cold starts, medium scale, no guarantee, JS/TS only
- AWS Lambda@Edge: 100-200ms cold starts, very high scale, 99.95% regional, many languages
The bar just moved. Incumbents will either adopt WebAssembly or watch developers migrate to faster platforms. The serverless cold start problem that’s plagued the industry since 2014 finally has a solution—and it’s forcing everyone to adapt or fall behind.
Serverless just got fast enough for real-time everything. The cold start tax is dead. WebAssembly killed it.
