Industry News and Opinions

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.

It’s true: Cosmonic, the WebAssembly pioneer, is bringing the joy back to distributed application development. Our goal is to enable developers to deliver truly portable applications, independent of where they execute and the capabilities they deliver.

With the 0.50 release of wasmCloud, we proudly believe we’re enabling a critical foundation for building universally portable cloud-native applications with WebAssembly that can plug into multi-cloud, multi-edge and far-edge environments directly inside a browser.

This blog post summarizes our KubeCon EU 2021 Keynote - Cloud Native & WebAssembly: Better Together.

In this blog post and the accompanying video, we will share the story of the rise of WebAssembly. We will give you a high-level overview of what WebAssembly is all about, why you should care, and how Cloud Native and WebAssembly are better together.