Hyperlight WASM: Fast, secure, and OS-free

Last fall the Azure Core Upstream team introduced Hyperlight: an open-source Rust library you can use to execute small, embedded functions using hypervisor-based protection. Then, we showed how to run Rust functions really, really fast, followed by using C to run Javascript. In February 2025, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted to onboard Hyperlight into their Sandbox program. We’re announcing the release of Hyperlight Wasm: a Hyperlight virtual machine (VM) “micro-guest” that can run wasm component workloads written in many programming languages. If you’d like to dive straight in, you can visit the hyperlight-wasm repo on GitHub. In the remainder of this post we’ll cover the basics of how Hyperlight Wasm works and then walk through how to build a Rust example step-by-step. Performance and compatibility Traditional virtual machines do a lot of work to be able to run programs. Not only do they have to load an entire operating system, they also boot up the virtual devic ... Read full article.