Kirin orchestrates webassembly services for efficient cloud workloads
Kirin: Cloud-native WebAssembly Service Orchestration
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Summary
Cloud computing often uses containers to run different programs safely and efficiently, but containers can be slow and use extra resources. The authors developed Kirin, a system that runs programs using WebAssembly, a lightweight technology that can start faster and use less overhead. Kirin handles important tasks like deciding where to run programs, scaling them up or down, and managing their lifecycle. Their tests show that Kirin can match container performance for many typical services but still struggles with heavy CPU tasks.
What this means in practice
- •For cloud infrastructure teams: Manage and deploy services with lighter-weight WebAssembly workloads to improve lifecycle management compared to containers.
- •For edge computing operators: Use Kirin to orchestrate WebAssembly services at the edge, benefiting from faster start times and reduced overhead.
Authors
Joshua Bauer, Sebastian Werner, Maria C. Borges
Abstract
Modern cloud computing infrastructure relies heavily on virtualization to provide workload isolation and resource efficiency. While containers have become the dominant deployment primitive due to their fast orchestration compared to traditional virtual machines, they still introduce non-trivial overhead. WebAssembly (Wasm) has emerged as an alternative isolation technology, offering a lightweight execution model. Because of compatibility limitations, WebAssembly has mainly been applied to Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Edge Computing scenarios, where it has attracted growing research interest. However, recent advances in the WebAssembly ecosystem have significantly matured the technology, raising the question of whether it can serve as a viable replacement for containers in cloud-native workloads. In this paper, we present Kirin, an orchestrator for cloud-native WebAssembly services. It supports core orchestration responsibilities, including resource scheduling, lifecycle management, scaling, and request routing. We evaluate Kirin against container-based deployments for several service workloads and demonstrate promising results, particularly in service lifecycle management. Simultaneously, we confirm known limitations in CPU-intensive workloads. However, for typical service workloads, Kirin demonstrates competitive performance, suggesting that WebAssembly is a viable candidate for broader adoption as a cloud-native deployment technology.