Guests: Ari Weil | Matt Butcher
Companies: Akamai | Fermyon
Show Name: An Eye on AI
Topic: Edge Computing, Kubernetes

Most acquisitions are about filling product gaps. But Akamai’s purchase of Fermyon represents something bigger: a fundamental rethinking of how applications should run at the edge. In this clip, Ari Weil, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai, and Matt Butcher, CEO and Co-Founder of Fermyon, (now VP of Product at Akamai), reveal the technical and strategic forces that made this deal inevitable—and what it signals for the future of distributed computing.

From Helm to WebAssembly: Matt Butcher’s Journey to Fermyon

Matt Butcher’s credentials in cloud native infrastructure are formidable. As one of the original creators of Helm, the package manager that became essential to Kubernetes adoption, Butcher helped define how organizations deploy containerized workloads. His career trajectory—from OpenStack to Docker to Kubernetes—traces the evolution of cloud computing itself.

But four and a half years ago, Butcher and nine colleagues from Microsoft identified a gap that containers couldn’t fill. “Serverless style workloads really needed a specialized compute layer,” Butcher explains. Traditional serverless platforms like AWS Lambda worked well for request-response functions, but they weren’t optimized for edge deployment where latency and cold start times become critical.

The team founded Fermyon with a specific vision: build the next generation of serverless computing using WebAssembly. They started with Spin, an open-source developer tool now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) alongside Kubernetes. Then came SpinKube, a Kubernetes runtime. But the real breakthrough came when Fermyon partnered with Akamai to deploy these WebAssembly functions across Akamai’s massive global edge network.

“It’s really cool to run a serverless function with cold start in under half a millisecond,” Butcher notes. “But if you get 300 milliseconds of network delay, that half-millisecond cold start doesn’t raise anybody’s eyebrows.”

The partnership created Fermyon WebAssembly Functions—what Butcher describes as “the fastest serverless runtime running on the world’s most distributed platform.”

Why Akamai Needed Fermyon: The Customer Pain Points

From Akamai’s perspective, the acquisition solved concrete customer problems that had been building for years. Ari Weil outlines how Akamai’s edge computing offerings evolved—from Edge Java to metadata configuration languages to Edge Workers—each iteration trying to give developers more flexibility at the edge.

“What we found was developers use a number of different languages. Languages evolve very quickly,” Weil explains. “We needed something where they can code in the language of their choice and consider not just ephemeral processing abilities, but increasingly have edge distributed applications.”

The limitation wasn’t just about supporting multiple programming languages. Akamai’s enterprise customers in commerce, manufacturing, travel, and publishing sectors needed true stateful applications running at the edge—not just lightweight functions. Traditional serverless frameworks couldn’t deliver this. Container-based approaches introduced too much overhead.

Fermyon’s WebAssembly-based platform solved both problems: it supported any language that compiles to WebAssembly, and it could handle stateful, distributed applications with the performance characteristics edge deployment demands.

Why Partnership Became Acquisition

The technical fit was clear from early collaboration. But as Weil recounts, bringing Fermyon’s technology to Akamai customers surfaced a deeper issue.

“As we brought Matt and the team to a lot of Akamai customers together, we found they were having a similar reaction. They had the same beliefs. And the biggest thing that was going to hold us back in realizing some of the potential that we saw was the fact that we weren’t one company.”

Integration friction—between platforms, roadmaps, go-to-market strategies—would slow the innovation pace both companies wanted. The acquisition removes those barriers, allowing Akamai to integrate Fermyon’s WebAssembly runtime deeply into its infrastructure-to-edge computing continuum.

What This Signals for Edge Computing

This acquisition represents more than consolidation. It validates WebAssembly as the compute substrate for edge-native applications—a shift with implications across the industry. Containers revolutionized cloud computing by providing portable, isolated execution environments. But at the edge, where milliseconds matter and resources are constrained, WebAssembly’s lightweight sandboxing and near-instant cold starts offer compelling advantages.

Akamai now operates 4,300+ edge locations globally. With Fermyon’s technology integrated, developers can deploy stateful, distributed applications across that entire footprint—writing code in their preferred language, with sub-millisecond startup times, and relying on WebAssembly’s security model.

For enterprises evaluating edge strategies, the message is clear: the next generation of distributed applications won’t just be deployed to the edge. They’ll be architected for it from the ground up, using WebAssembly as the foundation.