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# Fun with PaaS – How to use Cloud Foundry and its uniqueness in creative ways

Traditional serverless cold starts cripple performance. Server-side WebAssembly fixes this by delivering sub-millisecond execution across any platform. Build lightning-fast microservices effortlessly with minimal configuration.

- **Speakers:** Maurice Brinkmann
- **Event:** World Congress 2023
- **Published:** September 21, 2023
- **Duration:** 29:49
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/673-fun-with-paas-how-to-use-cloud-foundry-and-its-uniqueness-in-creative-ways

## Summary

The cloud computing landscape has evolved from heavyweight virtual machines to medium-weight Docker containers, ultimately reaching the lightweight, event-driven paradigm of serverless functions. While traditional serverless architectures empower developers to focus heavily on business logic rather than daemonized processes, they suffer from critical drawbacks. Traditional FaaS platforms often impose 200–500 millisecond cold starts, which penalizes search rankings and dramatically increases e-commerce cart abandonment, as human attention naturally wanes after just 100 milliseconds. Furthermore, developers face painful friction from operating system lock-in and high cognitive overhead just to provision basic application environments and connected databases.

To solve these structural limitations, server-side WebAssembly emerges as a highly optimized, third layer of compute specifically tailored for serverless workloads. Although originally designed to execute secure, multi-language byte code inside web browsers, WebAssembly perfectly matches modern cloud infrastructure requirements. It provides a robust security sandbox, pure cross-platform execution without hardware abstraction penalties, and staggering sub-millisecond cold start times. Just as Java outgrew its embedded device origins and Ruby expanded beyond shell scripting, WebAssembly has evolved past the browser into a high-performance runtime capable of handling robust serverless demands across a wide variety of programming languages.

Applying this concept practically, open-source development tools like the Fermyon Spin framework drastically simplify the creation and deployment of server-side WebAssembly applications, bundling database setups and key-value storage directly into the local workflow. The extreme speed of this architecture is highlighted through "Finicky Whiskers," a purposefully inefficient browser game acting as an adorable manual backend load generator. By forcing players to trigger dozens of independent WebAssembly microservices per second without experiencing visual lag, the application proves that this lightweight layer can effortlessly manage high-volume, event-driven requests. Ultimately, developers can escape the deployment inertia of legacy platforms and build highly responsive, portable services with minimal configuration.

**Keywords:** serverless computing evolution, server-side webassembly, FaaS deployment challenges, fermyon spin framework, sub-millisecond cold starts, cross-platform bytecode execution, cloud native workload isolation, event-driven software patterns, rust application compilation, stateless microservice routing, e-commerce latency optimization, manual backend load generation, cloud infrastructure modernization, sandbox security models, local database provisioning

## Chapters

1. **Career evolution from content management to cloud infrastructure** (00:02) — Background experiences in cloud technologies lead to the exploration of WebAssembly.
1. **Introducing the Finicky Whiskers cat feeding game** (01:34) — An interactive browser game demonstrates rapid server execution and state management.
1. **Defining serverless as a software development paradigm** (02:56) — Serverless computing shifts development focus to event handlers rather than managing hardware environments.
1. **The evolution of cloud computing and virtualization** (04:33) — Cloud architectures progress from heavyweight virtual machines to containers and lightweight web functions.
1. **Identifying developer frustrations with serverless architectures** (07:32) — Cold start times and complex operational requirements hinder the developer experience for distributed serverless functions.
1. **The origins and design principles of WebAssembly** (12:46) — A resilient byte code format emerges to provide secure and cross-platform execution capabilities inside web browsers.
1. **How programming technologies outgrow their original purposes** (17:41) — Languages like Java and Ruby evolved far beyond their initial embedded contexts and localized scripting applications.
1. **Using WebAssembly for fast and secure serverless computing** (20:05) — WebAssembly offers an optimized runtime capable of executing secure serverless workload iterations in mere milliseconds.
1. **Building serverless functions with the Spin developer tool** (22:35) — Spin streamlines the creation and deployment of executable web assembly binaries across varied environments.
1. **Architecting the Finicky Whiskers game with WebAssembly microservices** (24:31) — The intentionally inefficient game generates immense remote load to accurately demonstrate the execution speed of web microservices.
1. **Streamlining local development with integrated storage solutions** (28:39) — Built-in support for databases and key value storage reduces the typical burden of configuring local testing environments.

## Related Moments

- [Introduction to WebAssembly in a cloud computing context](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/972-webassembly-the-next-frontier-of-cloud-computing) (from "WebAssembly: The Next Frontier of Cloud Computing")
- [Applying WebAssembly to serverless cloud environments](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/687-the-future-of-cloud-is-webassembly) (from "The Future of Cloud is WebAssembly")
- [Analyzing the microservice architecture of Finicky Whiskers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/687-the-future-of-cloud-is-webassembly) (from "The Future of Cloud is WebAssembly")
- [Building serverless WebAssembly workloads with Spin](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/687-the-future-of-cloud-is-webassembly) (from "The Future of Cloud is WebAssembly")
- [Redefining WebAssembly beyond browser video games](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/886-webassembly-the-next-frontier-of-cloud-computing) (from "WebAssembly: The Next Frontier of Cloud Computing")
- [Deploying WebAssembly modules in cloud and serverless platforms](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/972-webassembly-the-next-frontier-of-cloud-computing) (from "WebAssembly: The Next Frontier of Cloud Computing")

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