WebAssembly on the Cloud Continuum: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation on Kubernetes

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic, practice-driven evaluation of WebAssembly (WASM) as an execution substrate for cloud-native workloads orchestrated through Docker and Kubernetes using runwasi. We develop a reproducible workflow that compiles Rust and Go/TinyGo applications to WASM modules, applies Ahead-of-Time (AOT) optimizations per engine and architecture, and packages minimal OCI artifacts for multi-architecture deployment (amd64, arm64, riscv64). Through controlled experiments on heterogeneous nodes, we benchmark eight CPU-bound workloads, reporting mean, median, and confidence intervals to ensure statistical robustness. The results show that WASM achieves latencies close to native on amd64/arm64, with WasmEdge leading under AOT and Wasmtime offering strong compatibility and stability. Artifact sizes are substantially smaller than traditional containers, improving pull times and packing density. While riscv64 execution is feasible, it remains less mature and more sensitive to engine and build choices. Overall, the findings demonstrate that WASM is a viable and efficient option for Cloud Continuum environments when deployments rely on AOT-optimized artifacts, RuntimeClass-based scheduling, and workloads aligned with the WASI feature set supported by the selected engines.