WebAssembly as a Lightweight Path to Sustainable and High-Performance Cloud-Native Computing

Sustainability is becoming a central objective for cloud and edge infrastructures, particularly in telecommunications, where large-scale deployments increase energy costs and environmental impact. This paper evaluates WebAssembly (Wasm) as a next-generation execution layer, examining its ability to combine high performance with improved resource efficiency. Leveraging our proposed open-source WasmPulse benchmarking framework, we compare Wasm with containers and bare-metal across artifact size, startup time, networking, and resource usage. The results show that while bare-metal remains the most efficient, Wasm achieves performance close to containers while offering distinct sustainability benefits: up to 98% faster startup, significantly smaller artifacts, and more stable memory scaling under load. These advantages reduce computational overhead and resource consumption, enabling efficient and rapid service deployment.Obtained results position WebAssembly as a lightweight, performant, and sustainable execution model, with strong potential for telco-grade cloud-native infrastructures.