WebAssembly: The Next Frontier in Cloud-Native Evolution - OpenObservability Talks S5E02

Time to explore the next frontier in cloud-native evolution: WebAssembly (WASM). Moving beyond containers and Kubernetes, WASM bears the promise to revolutionize the cloud landscape with unparalleled performance, portability, and security. Can it actually deliver on this promise? We discussed this and more it in this episode.

We delved into how WASM is transforming the way we build and run cloud-native applications, enabling a more efficient, scalable, and flexible infrastructure. We also got latest insights from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s work in the domain, the wasmCloud open source project and the tool landscape, along with the work of the WASM working group and standardization efforts with the Bytecode Alliance.

This episode’s guest is Taylor Thomas, Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He serves as a co-chair for the CNCF’s WASM working group, and as a CNCF Ambassador. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the creators of Krustlet and Bindle. His work at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft spanned various containers and Kubernetes platforms as well as WebAssembly platforms.

The episode was live-streamed on 18 July 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2xIoVNwtKM

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

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Show Notes:

• 00:00 - Show, episode and guest intro
• 04:50 - Celebrating a decade to Kubernetes and the power of open source communities
• 07:18 - What is WebAssembly (WASM)
• 11:29 - WASM support among programming languages
• 15:24 - IDE, debuggers and developer experience using WASM
• 18:48 - WASM support for browser and Frontend (DOM manipulation etc.)
• 21:13 - Standardization of WASM in operating systems
• 23:40 - WASM component model
• 29:43 - WASM working groups in the CNCF and Bytecode Alliance
• 31:36 - WASM ecosystem
• 36:57 - Which workloads WASM fits best
• 40:01 - what’s wasmCloud
• 44:18 - wasmCloud benefits for Platform Engineering, IoT and Edge Computing
• 47:22 - WASM compatibility with Kubernetes
• 49:54 - Observability in wasmCloud, OpenTelemetry support, and WASI-Observe
• 52:23 - Who’s behind wasmCloud
• 56:21 - wasmCloud roadmap and community forum
• 59:07 - CNCF 2024 mid-year survey of top open source projects velocity
• 1:00:05 - OpenSearch project has just turned 3

Resources:

• https://webassembly.org/
• W3C WebAssembly (WASM) standard: https://www.w3.org/TR/wasm-core-2/
• W3C WebAssembly community group: https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/wasm/
• Bytecode Alliance: https://bytecodealliance.org/
• CNCF’s WASM working group: https://tag-runtime.cncf.io/wgs/wasm/
• WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) specification: https://wasi.dev/
• WASI-Observe observability API specification: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-observe
• wasmCloud https://wasmcloud.com/
• wasmCloud 1.0: https://wasmcloud.com/blog/wasmcloud-1-brings-components-to-enterprise
• wasmCloud roadmap: https://wasmcloud.com/docs/roadmap/q2

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Dotan Horovits

============

Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Taylor Thomas ============ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oftaylor/