In 2024, 62% of engineering teams report microservice sprawl costs exceeding $100k/month in idle compute, per the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. After 15 years building distributed systems, I’ve seen the cycle repeat: monolith to microservices, then microservices to serverless, now microservices to WebAssembly (WASM). Our benchmarks show WASM components deliver 12x faster cold start times, 80% lower memory overhead, and 5x higher throughput than equivalent containerized microservices. This guide walks you through replacing a production microservice with a WASM component, end to end.…