Fermyon Technologies announced a partnership with Akamai to bring edge-native serverless and AI applications to the world's largest distributed cloud platform and content delivery network (CDN). The new Fermyon Wasm Functions engine offers blazingly fast, portable, polyglot WebAssembly-based serverless running on Akamai's globally distributed network.

Media, ecommerce, financial services and other high-volume digital experience companies know that even 100-millisecond delays can impact customer engagement and online revenue. Latency-sensitive applications in slow, centralized servers compound this problem. With the performance characteristics of WebAssembly providing the underlying magic, this partnership will usher in a new era of highly responsive, edge-native applications delivered faster than the blink of an eye (<100 milliseconds).

Fermyon Wasm Functions Overview

Fermyon Wasm Functions is a multi-tenant, hosted, globally distributed engine for serverless functions running on Akamai Cloud, a globally distributed network. It provides Akamai customers with the ability to integrate Akamai's existing services-such as EdgeWorkers, object storage, globally available CPU and GPU compute capabilities, and CDN-with a WebAssembly-based serverless platform.

Starting today, Akamai customers can develop WebAssembly applications and deploy them through Fermyon Wasm Functions, enabling them to:

• Build edge-native distributed applications with lower egress cost than hyperscalers.
• Develop cost-effective AI inferencing applications that execute near the user.
• Integrate powerful edge-native applications with Akamai's existing CDN, EdgeWorker, and object storage offerings.
• Cut cold start time of edge-native applications to a mere fraction of a millisecond, which, combined with Akamai's largest network in the world, delivers responses to end users faster than the blink of an eye.
• Empower developers to build and deploy edge applications with unprecedented ease of use and speed. Fermyon again delivers on the promise of taking developers from blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less.

Akamai customers will be able to directly procure Fermyon Wasm Functions from Akamai. Akamai is providing credits toward a trial of Fermyon Wasm Functions for a limited time and for experimental volumes.

"Companies worldwide are moving toward a more distributed cloud model, especially for AI workloads which benefit from proximity to the data. Serverless WebAssembly enables massive performance gains while making applications easier to build, manage, and secure-by-default - and Fermyon is the clear leader in this space. Our partnership will accelerate companies' development and adoption of AI agents that benefit from distributed data and compute that only the Akamai Cloud can provide," said Jon Alexander, VP of Product at Akamai.

"Bringing the world's fastest serverless platform to the world's most distributed cloud computing platform is a big win for any organization interested in delivering dynamic content faster than the blink of an eye," said Fermyon CEO, Matt Butcher. "With cold starts under half a millisecond, robust service APIs, AI and GPU integration, and support for a broad array of programming languages, Fermyon brings Akamai customers next-generation edge compute that is not just industry leading, but redefining."