Spin 1.0 aims to simplify WebAssembly microservices

Fermyon Technologies has published Spin 1.0, the first stable release of the company’s open source framework for building event-driven microservice applications with WebAssembly.

Spin 1.0 was formally introduced on March 22. With Spin, developers can build WebAssembly microservices and web applications for deployment in the cloud. WebAssembly, a fast bytecode format created to run non-JavaScript code in the web browser, provides near-native speed, fast startup time, portability, and sandboxed execution, Fermyon noted.

The goal of Spin is make it easy to turn code into a WebAssembly application. Spin supports languages including Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, and C#, and offers a CLI for building distributed applications. The spin new command is used to create a new application based on starter templates, spin build compiles applications to WebAssembly, and spin up runs the application locally. 

Spin is available on GitHub, and instructions for getting started with Spin can be found on Fermyon’s website. A classic Spin application is akin to a high-performance lambda-like function, where a function is defined that will run start to finish every time a new request comes in. The Spin 1.0 release includes database connectivity, distributing applications using popular registry services, and a built-in key value store persisting state. Support for running applications on Kubernetes is also a focus of the Spin 1.0 release.

An example cited of how Spin is being used was a large, machine learning-style application, where users put data into a training algorithm. Spin would receive this data and push it into the cue to be processed. Another example is high-performance websites, where everything is compiled into WebAssembly as a function.

To monetize Spin, Fermyon plans to build out its Fermyon Cloud as a place to execute Spin applications. Other cloud services also will support Spin applications, such as Azure Kubernetes Service. Future plans for Spin involve adding features such as internal database support.