WASP: A Configurable Framework for Portable Stateful Serverless Applications

2026-07-28

AI Summary

Existing WebAssembly-based serverless platforms are typically tied to specific execution engines and support only stateless applications, making them ill-suited for deploying stateful applications in edge computing environments under heterogeneous hardware and workload constraints. To address this limitation, this work proposes WASP, a framework featuring a fully decoupled, plug-in architecture that enables flexible configuration of runtime environments, data storage, lifecycle management, and caching policies—without requiring modifications to application code. WASP is the first to enable portability of stateful serverless applications across the edge-to-cloud continuum, overcoming the hard-coded runtime and state management restrictions of current platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that WASP incurs negligible runtime overhead while significantly tuning memory usage and latency, thereby effectively adapting to heterogeneous edge–cloud scenarios.

Abstract

WebAssembly (WASM) is emerging as a lightweight alternative to containers for Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) across the edge-cloud continuum. However, existing WASM-based serverless platforms are tightly coupled to specific execution engines and predominantly designed for stateless workloads. This clashes with the heterogeneity of edge deployments, which demand support for stateful applications under diverse hardware and workload constraints. We introduce WASP, a configurable framework that brings stateful serverless execution to the edge-cloud continuum. By abandoning monolithic architectures in favor of strictly decoupled, pluggable components, WASP lets system administrators swap the WASM runtime and the datastore to fit available resources and application requirements, without altering application code. Configurable lifecycle and caching policies further enable fine-tuning for diverse non-functional requirements. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that WASP introduces negligible runtime overhead and, by swapping runtimes, datastores, and policies, exposes radically different memory and latency profiles, confirming its adaptability to the heterogeneous constraints of the edge-cloud continuum.

Problem

• WebAssembly
• stateful serverless
• edge-cloud continuum
• heterogeneity
• Function-as-a-Service

Innovation

• WebAssembly
• stateful serverless
• edge-cloud continuum
• pluggable architecture
• configurable framework