Zero cold starts: Building and shipping MCP servers with WebAssembly, Spin and Akamai Functions
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-11
Thorsten Hans, senior developer advocate at Akamai, demonstrates at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 how WebAssembly at the edge eliminates the three main pain points of AI apps: cold starts, proprietary SDK lock-in, and single-region deployments.
Key points
- Build MCP servers with Spin, the open-source WebAssembly framework, and deploy to Akamai Functions, a globally distributed serverless platform with no cold starts
- Scaffold tools in TypeScript and Rust with wasmcp, compose them into a full server, and test with MCP Inspector
- Deploy worldwide in about 60 seconds with one command, then call the tools from the Zed editor
- Demo of an agent built on the Vercel AI SDK backed by a Linode GPU model, with memory snapshots keeping apps warm
Server-side WebAssembly is fast, portable, and sandboxed by default; edge-native beats single-region for AI apps.
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