I've been tinkering quite a bit with WasmCloud and WasmEdge lately, for some data workloads (scraping, ingesting, apis etc) mainly as an excuse to learn WebAssembly.

What I want to see for myself is how Unit compares to those for this reduced scope (api's/services) and how fast I can be productive with it. This could be a good starting point for a lot of new applications, kind of an "airflow (the data orchestration thing) on Webassembly".

So main points are performance (is it good enough) and developer experience (is it easy to maintain/change).

Nothing really ground breaking, just trying out stuff.

My limited understanding from various blog posts is that you can still get the benefits of a container, but much faster startup/runtimes. As in WASM provides performance very close to native.

Security isolation too. I am using a WASM-based image processing pipeline for handling user submitted images. Much safer than trying to run a binary (Imagemagick, ffmpeg, etc) written in an unsafe language. In my case, the WASM does not have access to anything outside the sandbox.

As siblings have mentioned: sandboxing.

You don't need your language/runtime to support arm/other to run same compile artifact on arm32, arm64, power5 and amd64 - compile to wasm once, run anywhere (nginx unit would still need to support your target).

Your runtime theoretically don't need is support - compile to wasm, run on FreeBSD/arm.

You can compile your c microservice to wasm, and your rust microservice, and your c++ microservice to wasm - and deploy them sandboxed via the same stack - reducing complexity (note that another option is to deploy via nginx unit - different way to reduce complexity).