IoT Edge Serverless

The term Internet of Things (IoT) has been around for over a decade and is used to describe network-available smart devices like color-changing lightbulbs or speakers that can join together over a WiFi connection. Sensing that the term IoT, like the “as-a-Service” acronyms, has lost its lustre, some have recently taken to using the term “edge” in lieu of “IoT.” To clarify the meaning, we’ve merely put the two terms together. But in truth, this sense of edge is synonymous with the regular usage of the term “IoT.”

Again, it is useful to point out that WebAssembly (Wasm) has made big inroads in the IoT space. We’ve already enumerated many of the benefits of Wasm, but an additional feature of Wasm is pertinent to the IoT use case: Wasm can be executed on low-power, low-resource hardware. Runtimes like Intel’s Wasm Micro Runtime (WAMR) function well in embedded environments.

We suspect that serverless apps will become increasingly popular in this space precisely because of their minimalist nature. And, of course, we at Fermyon have done some experimentation with running Spin on smaller devices. (It runs out of the box on Raspberry Pi class hardware).