Zero Cold Starts: Serverless AI Agents on Akamai Functions — Thorsten Hans

Cold starts, proprietary SDKs and one-region deployments slow AI apps down. WebAssembly at the edge removes all three. Thorsten Hans, senior developer advocate at Akamai, shows how to build and ship MCP servers and AI agents with Spin, the open-source WebAssembly framework, and run them on Akamai Functions, a globally distributed serverless platform with no cold starts. He explains why WebAssembly on the server is fast, portable and sandboxed by default, then live-codes MCP servers with wasmcp: scaffolding tools in TypeScript and Rust, composing them into a full server, testing with MCP Inspector, deploying it worldwide in about 60 seconds with one command, and calling its tools from the Zed editor. He finishes with an agent built on the Vercel AI SDK, backed by a model on a Linode GPU, and explains how memory snapshots keep apps warm. In this talk: • Why edge-native beats single-region for AI apps, and how WebAssembly kills cold starts • What Spin and Akamai Functions are • Building and composing MCP servers with wasmcp in TypeScript and Rust • Deploying an MCP server and an AI agent globally with one command SPEAKER Thorsten Hans, Senior Developer Advocate, Akamai LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ThorstenHans/ X: https://twitter.com/ThorstenHans GitHub: https://github.com/ThorstenHans Website: https://thorsten-hans.com LINKS Spin: https://spinframework.dev Spin (GitHub): https://github.com/spinframework/spin Akamai Functions: https://www.akamai.com/products/akamai-functions wasmcp (GitHub): https://github.com/wasmcp/wasmcp CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:57 Why edge-native? 1:32 The cold start problem 2:52 WebAssembly on the server 3:37 What is Spin? 4:52 Akamai Functions 5:32 Sandboxed by default 7:32 Demo: scaffolding with wasmcp 9:41 Composing an MCP server 10:16 Testing with MCP Inspector 12:56 Deploying to Akamai Functions 14:16 Using it from an MCP client 16:16 An agent with the Vercel AI SDK 18:21 Memory snapshots 20:56 Key takeaways Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #WebAssembly #MCP #AIEngineer