Fermyon Launches With First Cloud-Native WebAssembly PaaS for Developers Creating Microservice-Based Apps, Raises $6 Million Seed Funding Led by Amplify Partners

By AIT News Desk On Jun 22, 2022

Fermyon Technologies, the company building the next wave of cloud computing, formally launched with its lightweight open source application platform for creating WebAssembly microservices. WebAssembly is a “build once, run anywhere” technology designed to enable apps to run inside the browser, that is now being applied to solving cloud problems where speed and security are paramount. Fermyon cohesively brings together packaging, compiling, versioning, deployment and management of apps and microservices for WebAssembly all managed within a powerful user interface for developers.

“Fermyon brings the ease of a developer self-service Platform-as-a-Service to the burgeoning WebAssembly ecosystem. We are passionate about pioneering this next wave of cloud computing alongside the container and virtual machine technologies already in use today,” said Matt Butcher, co-founder and CEO of Fermyon.

Technologists on Fermyon:

WebAssembly co-creator Luke Wagner said: ”WebAssembly is now a very mature, very well-tested technology with proven scale, speed and security in the browser. It’s only natural to see WebAssembly make inroads into the cloud and I can’t think of a more credible, expert team than Fermyon to bring meaningful value to cloud-native developers.”
HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar said: “Fermyon is pioneering the use of WebAssembly in the cloud by bringing all of the necessary cloud-native compute components, including an integration with HashiCorp Nomad into a complete platform that makes it easier for developers to focus on what matters the most.”
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) CTO Chris Aniszczyk said: “Matt and his team have been core contributors and leading thinkers of the cloud native computing, building bridges with WebAssembly in the cloud as a new, foundational constituent technology. They are great long term community participants and contributors to the work of CNCF, especially its WebAssembly-focused efforts.”

Matt Butcher (CEO) and his co-founder Radu Matei (CTO) have worked on container technologies for years. As part of Deis and then DeisLabs at Microsoft, their team explored the container landscape and built Helm (the Kubernetes package manager used in 70% of all Kubernetes installations with 3 million monthly downloads and 21,900 GitHub stars), as well as Brigade (the Kubernetes VS Code extension), Open Application Model, CNAB and others.

Along the journey they faced myriad problems with containers from speed and cost especially at scale. Initially, they explored running WebAssembly in Kubernetes which led to the creation of Krustlet, now part of the CNCF, which lets users run WebAssembly side by side with OCI containers. By the time they released Krustlet, it was clear that WebAssembly was a foundation for the next wave of cloud computing which led them and 7 other DeisLabs engineers to leave Microsoft and create Fermyon.

Fermyon is focused on empowering cloud developers to quickly realize the things they think about creating and focus on the code that brings value instead of the obligatory foundation code. Fermyon introduced its first open source project, Spin, earlier this year. Spin is an instrumental piece of Fermyon that makes it easy for users to run production workloads with WebAssembly, and it achieved 1,000 GitHub stars within the first 6 weeks after its release.

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Today Fermyon is releasing its platform that eliminates 90% of the hassle, complexity and cost of building cloud apps by offering a complete WebAssembly-based execution environment with an associated easy-to-use Web interface. On Fermyon, WebAssembly microservices start in milliseconds instead of seconds, scale up or down nearly instantly and are executed in a secure sandbox environment. Fermyon runs on WebAssembly because of its “build once, run anywhere” technology – its apps can be run on Windows, macOS and Linux without recompiling or rewriting.

Fermyon provides a Functions-as-a-Service API similar to AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. Developers can rapidly compose microservices, web apps, scheduled batch jobs or machine learning triggered by HTTP, Redis pubsub or time-based events.

Fermyon is built on a suite of existing open source projects that jointly comprise a WebAssembly PaaS. Hippo provides a web interface, Bindle manages packages, HashiCorp’s Nomad orchestrates deployments and Spin adds templating, monitoring, logging and caching to its execution environment. From these, Fermyon assembles the first WebAssembly PaaS that takes the user from blinking cursor to deployed microservice in mere minutes.

Fermyon Raises $6 Million Seed Funding

Today Fermyon also announced that it has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Amplify Partners with participation from Priyanka Sharrma (Executive Director of CNCF), Tyler McMullen (CTO of Fastly), Grant Miller (CEO of Replicated), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Marc Campbell (CTO at Replicated), Manuel Weiss (co-founder of Codeship), Mark Pundsack (CPO at Replicated) and Andrei Pitis (CEO of Simple Capital). Fermyon plans to use the funding to invest more in serving the developer community and to productize Fermyon.

“WebAssembly has the potential to redefine how developers build and run applications in the cloud, and no one is better suited to realize that vision than Matt, Radu and the Fermyon team,” said Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner at Amplify Partners and Fermyon Board Member. “Their past leadership of projects like Helm and Krustlet gives us confidence they can ship impactful software while also responsibly stewarding an open source community.”

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