Retrospective: Adopting WebAssembly 2.0 and Rust 1.95 for Edge Compute Across 50 Regions in 2026 January 15, 2027 By the Edge Infrastructure Team Introduction In early 2026, our team committed to migrating all edge compute workloads from legacy containerized runtimes to a stack built on WebAssembly 2.0 (Wasm 2.0) and Rust 1.95. The goal: reduce cold start latency by 80%, cut per-region deployment overhead by 60%, and unify our runtime across 50 global edge regions spanning North America, Europe, APAC, and South America. This retrospective details our 12-month rollout, technical wins, unexpected roadblocks, and actionable lessons for teams pursuing similar Wasm-first edge strategies. Why We Chose Wasm 2.0 and Rust 1.95 Our legacy stack relied on lightweight Linux containers for edge functions, but we hit hard limits: 400ms average cold start times, 12% per-region runtime overhead, and fragmented tooling for cross-architecture support (we run on x86 and ARM edge nodes).…