Akamai, a long-established content delivery network (CDN) company, has acquired WebAssembly start-up Fermyon, with the aim of attracting more developers to its edge computing platform, called Akamai Cloud.
Fermyon was founded in 2021, with the goal of using WebAssembly (Wasm) and Wasmtime as a lightweight replacement for containers or virtual machines (VMs) when running microservices. Fermyon Spin is a framework for building and running microservices on Wasmtime, and a related project called SpinKube enables Wasm workloads on Kubernetes.
Wasmtime is a Wasm runtime that is coded in Rust. It is open source and a project of the Bytecode Alliance. Since it runs Wasm, it supports programming languages that compile to Wasm including Rust, C, Python, C#, Go and Ruby. Wasmtime is lightweight, sandboxed, and starts up fast when used for serverless functions. When Wasmtime 1.0 was released in September 2022, Fermyon said that “tens of thousands of WebAssembly binaries can run in a single Spin instance while keeping startup times under a millisecond.”
Ahead of the acquisition, Fermyon was already using Akamai for its Fermyon Wasm Functions, introduced in March 2025. Akamai said this week that Fermyon’s function-as-a-service (FaaS) capabilities would enable improved performance and lower costs compared to traditional cloud-native apps, though what “traditional” means in this context is not stated.
Akamai began commercial operations as a content delivery network in 1999, since when it has built a global network with low-latency data delivery to most locations. The company already offers a FaaS solution called EdgeWorkers, based on the V8 JavaScript engine also used by Chrome, Chromium and Node.js. Although that sounds similar to what its competitor Cloudflare offers via Cloudflare Workers, it is Cloudflare that has a more advanced and better-known developer platform. Akamai and Cloudflare specialist Rohit Patil said in September that the developer experience with EdgeWorkers “is more complex and less integrated than Cloudflare’s” and that Cloudflare’s developer platform “is years ahead in terms of vision, usability and ecosystem, making them the default choice for building new applications at the edge.”
The Fermyon acquisition looks like an attempt to win back some ground with a solution that has some technical advantages over the V8 isolates (sandboxed JavaScript runtime environments) used by Cloudflare workers. The security boundary between isolates may be weak in comparison to the Wasmtime sandboxing. Cloudflare workers do support Wasm but the docs warn of slower start-up.
Fermyon co-founder Mike Butcher said that open source contributions to the Spin framework, SpinKube and Wasmtime will continue.