Spin on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

Spin is an open source runtime for building and running WebAssembly serverless applications and microservices. It is a single self contained binary that loads a WebAssembly component and serves it over HTTP, so you run event driven microservices with the fast cold starts, strong sandboxing and tiny footprint of WebAssembly, without managing a language runtime or a container for each service. This image delivers Spin fully installed and configured on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running as a hardened systemd service behind nginx TLS termination, so a working WebAssembly application server is answering requests over HTTPS within minutes of launch.

A small prebuilt demo WebAssembly HTTP component ships at /opt/spin-app so a freshly launched instance immediately demonstrates end to end WebAssembly execution: browse to the instance over HTTPS and the demo component echoes your request path and reports a value it computed at request time, proving the Spin runtime actually executed the component rather than serving a static file. Drop your own compiled WebAssembly component into the application directory, point the Spin manifest at it, and restart the service to go live.

Application stack: Spin runs as a dedicated non root service bound to the loopback interface, and nginx terminates HTTPS on port 443 and reverse proxies requests to it, so the WebAssembly application itself is never directly exposed to the network. Plain HTTP on port 80 is permanently redirected to HTTPS. The prebuilt binary carries the whole runtime, so there is no separate language runtime to install and no container image to build for each microservice.

Secure by default: the WebAssembly application runs in the Spin sandbox with no ambient access to the host, is reachable only through the nginx reverse proxy, and answers over HTTPS immediately with a fresh per instance self signed TLS certificate generated on the first boot of your instance, so there is no shared or default certificate and no shared or default credentials of any kind, since Spin has no login. If you own a domain name you can front the instance with your own DNS and a trusted certificate.

Key capabilities: a single binary runtime for WebAssembly components; fast cold starts and strong per request sandboxing that make WebAssembly ideal for serverless microservices; an HTTP trigger that maps routes to WebAssembly components; the ability to build components from many languages including Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Go and run them all on one runtime; and a hardened systemd and nginx deployment that is ready for your own components out of the box.

Get started: review the shipped demo component and Spin manifest, build and deploy your own WebAssembly component into the application directory, open port 443 to your users, and optionally front the instance with your own domain for a trusted certificate. cloudimg engineers can walk you through building components, the Spin manifest, HTTP routing and certificate options after purchase.

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