Industry News and Opinions

Last week during KubeCon, Vertex Ventures joined Docker CEO Scott Johnston and cloud luminary Kelsey Hightower for a fireside chat. The conversation immediately turned to the hottest trend in technology - the rise of WebAssembly (Wasm) in the Cloud Native ecosystem.

There is nothing more chaotic today than the current state of cybersecurity.

In my latest article in The New Stack, “How Web Assembly Can Mitigate the Software Supply Chain Crisis,” I discussed the relative ease with which today’s predominant method for building software allows for malware infection across all components of an application.

Until now, the method for building software relied on the aggregation of software components that often lack distinct security boundaries between them.

During Cloud Native Wasm Day, Adobe’s Colin Murphy talked about how Adobe is using WebAssembly within its flagship web browser-based products Photoshop, Lightroom and Acrobat. He also explored potential Wasm use cases for edge compute and in the data center with wasmCloud.

During WasmDay and KubeCon EU, a handful of cloud native developers demonstrated how they’re using WebAssembly and wasmCloud to simplify distributed application development and dramatically reduce their costs.

In his Lightning Talk, “wasmCloud and Bevy ECS: Solution to Woe of Indie Game Developers” Alan, Poon Yong Quan demonstrated how he’s using wasmCloud and Bevy ECS, a data-driven game engine built in Rust, to lower cloud platform costs for multi-player games.

WebAssembly is poised to fundamentally transform the development of both browser and server-side development.

The virtualization of the CPU, OS, and the cloud with hypervisors, containers, and Kubernetes each marked epochs of technology that ushered in emerging trends in software architecture, design, development, operation, and life cycle management.

Imagine rapid development of platform-agnostic multi-cloud, multi-edge and far-edge platforms that run at near native speeds anywhere, at any scale. Fast, secure-by-default, distributed application development that eliminates entire classes of security and portability challenges at significant cost savings.

That’s the power and possibility of Cloud Native technologies and WebAssembly, a Better Together story that will take center stage in Valencia on the eve of KubeCon EU 2022.

Forrester Research recently produced “WebAssembly Wisdom: Best Practices for Wasm Wizards” (March 15, 2022, by Andrew Cornwall with Chris Gardner, Emma Goldberg, Zachary Stone, Kara Hartig) that offered advice about what to do and what not to do when contemplating Wasm development.

As Andrew remarked in his blog, “I am confident that bytecode is back and WebAssembly is here to stay… While WebAssembly emerged from a desire to improve the performance of computationally intensive browser apps, it can do much more than that.”

Catch up on the amazing CloudSkills.fm podcast online at CloudSkills.fm Episode 138 or on Apple Podcasts - CloudSkills.fm.

Those new to WebAssembly (Wasm) often start with the basics: “What is WebAssembly?,” “How does it work?,” and “Why is it worth paying attention to?”

Simply put, WebAssembly is a virtual machine that executes in a browser as an alternative to JavaScript. For the enterprise, the real magic comes from Wasm's evolution into a high-performance, cross-platform polyglot sandbox that can be used to build distributed and back-end systems.

Web assembly, when coupled with products like wasmCloud and NATS, is creating a new paradigm for cloud native, which should eliminate entire classes of problems that we struggle with today in building distributed applications.

As I wrote in The New Stack, one of the fastest-growing Cloud Native trends of 2021 is the adoption of WebAssembly (Wasm). With distributed application runtimes like wasmCloud (a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project we donated this summer) we see WebAssembly appearing on the server and the edge. This in turn addresses the myriad set of challenges hindering distributed application development, deployment, and maintenance.

The reasons behind the surge are broad and driven by CPU diversity, multiple operating environments, security, distributed application architecture, and scalability, all of which transcend deployments into a single public cloud provider.