Announcing the Submission of SpinKube to the CNCF Sandbox
Matt Butcher
spinkube
CNCF
sandbox
Today, Fermyon took the KubeCon keynote stage alongside Microsoft and ZEISS Group. Michelle, one of the founding engineers at Fermyon, introduced WebAssembly and shared why it has taken root in the cloud native world. And then things got practical.
ZEISS’ Ten Thousand Orders
Kai Walter, the Distinguished Architect from ZEISS, shared their pursuit of building an enterprise cloud platform optimized for efficiency, cost, and developer experience. Kai and Michelle walked through a demo of how Fermyon Spin applications can be run inside of Kubernetes, achieving staggering density and fantastic performance.
Then, as the coup de grâce, they shifted the Spin apps back and forth across Intel and Ampere Arm nodes without having to make a single change to the application. This is the power that WebAssembly brings to the cloud native world: a new way of building and executing serverless functions that doesn’t entail expensive pre-warmed nodes, ties to particular system architectures, or reliance on external services like Lambda.
Kai recently expressed to us why he was so excited about the prospects of WebAssembly for a large enterprise like ZEISS:
Utilizing Spin WebAssembly with SpinKube on Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service helps us to achieve faster scalability, and reach higher density without the need to dramatically change our operational posture.
With that we've been able to take a Kubernetes batch process of tens of thousands of orders and cut the compute cost by 60% without trading off performance.
We are excited to see WebAssembly become a first-class workload in Kubernetes. SpinKube and Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes will reshape how we all do high-performance computing in Kubernetes.
SpinKube Contributed to CNCF Sandbox
After the demo, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager Ralph Squillace introduced SpinKube, an open source project that provides all the tools you need for executing WebAssembly in your Kubernetes cluster. With contributions from SUSE, Liquid Reply, Microsoft, Fermyon, and others, SpinKube runs on everything from personal k3d clusters to massive AKS installations. As platform engineer Kasper Juul Hermansen put it:
The SpinKube project uses all the conventional Kubernetes tools to easily get it installed and set up. It took me 5 minutes before I could start deploying Spin WebAssembly applications to my cluster.
But wait! There’s more! Today, we at Fermyon are happy to announce that the SpinKube open source project has been submitted to the CNCF to become a sandbox project. The CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation and provides support, oversight and direction to fast-growing, cloud native projects; making new open source technologies accessible and sustainable. We want to ensure that SpinKube has the best home where countless individuals and organizations can continue to contribute and improve on the open source codebase. Of course, we at Fermyon have had our open source promise since the day we launched our website. But, a foundation offers even more in the sense of intellectual property protection, governance, and community.
SpinKube fits snugly into the Cloud Native landscape by providing unprecedented performance gains, cost savings, optimal efficiency around provisioning resources, and a streamlined experience for developing, deploying, and operating WebAssembly workloads on Kubernetes.
Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes: Our Enterprise Offering
After observing a recent spate of licensing changes and enterprise distribution alterations in the cloud native world, Fermyon has been grappling with how to balance the necessity of bringing in revenue to pay our own paychecks while still providing a ton of value in our open source work. Late last year I wrote about how we were rethinking open source licenses, and my conclusion then was that it makes the most sense to be maximalist about releasing features that benefit a wide audience. Therefore, if something is to be classed as “enterprise only,” it should be a thing that is genuinely of value to enterprises, but not necessary for smaller groups to use.
This is why we have just released Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes. While SpinKube can comfortably run hundreds of serverless functions in your Kubernetes cluster, larger Kubernetes installations will deeply benefit from gigantic boosts in efficiency. Clusters with more than ten nodes and with over a few hundred deployments can cut costs, improve performance, and scale from zero to tens of thousands and back again.
Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes includes a highly specialized WebAssembly runtime that can run thousands of serverless functions per node in your cluster. Radu (our CTO) recently demoed deploying 5,000 applications on a two-node Kubernetes cluster, and then proceeded to fire off in excess of 1.5 million function invocations in a ten-second window. This level of performance is provided by the ultra-fast Cyclotron runtime that ships with Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes.
If you are ready to build your first WebAssembly application, try out the Spin quickstart, then, with SpinKube you can install your app into your Kubernetes cluster and run it side-by-side with all of your existing containerized apps and sidecars. But if you truly crave a 50x efficiency boost in your cluster, get in touch with us because we’d love to show you what you can achieve with Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes.