Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) quantifies emissions from an application, combining operational and hardware emissions. Serverless functions reduce operational emissions by running apps on-demand, but faces cold-start delays. WebAssembly (Wasm) offers a solution to cold-start issues with near-instant startup, akin to containers but more efficiently.

Wasm modules are just as secure as containers with default sandboxing, yet they start almost instantly (in microseconds). In this session, we discuss why Wasm is the ideal & greenest unit of compute for Serverless applications and how you can get started using Serverless Wasm with Spin - an open source developer tool. We’ll demo running AI inferencing Spin applications and discuss how it also enables better GPU resource sharing. By the end, you’ll have an understanding of the characteristics that make Wasm a cost-effective and sustainable unit for a greener cloud.