Ultra fast response times serving static files with WebAssembly Workers

With trends moving to Serverless or Function-as-a-Service we've started building our web servers from instances of Express running inside Docker containers, to "functions" that instead run on managed infrastructure, responding to each request as they arrive.

Many cloud providers supply this type of system which is fast, cheap, and very easy to maintain as all you have to do is upload your functions.

Cloudflare in particular innovate further by replicating your worker to every edge node in their network, drastically limiting CPU + memory time, in exchange for response time as each worker 'instance' is located physically close to users. With previous approaches, worker instances were usually just located in a single region with redundant zones only; thus requiring a load balancer to be setup which is also not simple.

These Cloudflare workers are great as they offer unmatched performance at the edge, but if you're serving say a Progressive Web App, then why not bundle all our application assets into the worker as opposed to just serving responses.

One approach to achieve this is to publish all your assets the Cloudflare KV (latency key-value store at all of the data centers in Cloudflare's global network) then all the worker has to do is locate in the cache the required file for each request, and return it the response. The base subscription includes 10 million store reads as standard.

Approach, the one taken by this repo, is to use AssemblyScript to embed assets into a binary WebAssembly script, and use this to serve via the worker.

The edge node will load the WebAssembly file into it's memory, where the worker reads them for writing responses to requests.

This is an ultra fast technique as the files are always in system memory for near-zero latency response times.

Source Code: https://github.com/samkelleher/wasm-embed