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.
In this must-see conversation, Scott and Kelsey introduce WebAssembly as a technology, discuss the pros and cons of WebAssembly, and highlight some of the incredible use cases around Wasm. Scott also discusses Docker's recently launched native support for WebAssembly. As innovators in the WebAssembly community, we were thrilled to see an industry stalwart such as Docker talk about the future of WebAssembly. During the talk Kelsey remarked, "There is going to be an opportunity to create … a new computer. And that thing may challenge the way we think about file systems, it may challenge the way we think about protocols, it may challenge the way we distribute things." Along the same lines he also spoke about the security of the WebAssembly sandbox and how a deny-by-default model is rethinking the way we currently model security with containers where we layer on security after-the-fact instead of starting with a secure sandbox.
In Cloud Native application development today the majority of code built into applications is from open source libraries. This is code that the developer isn't writing themselves though they are responsible for any upgrades for vulnerabilities or patches. "Some 90% of all applications today are built from open source components and the new original code that’s added for the application is 5, 10, 15% at most", said Scott.
One of the areas we see as most promising with Wasm is its flexibility to run anywhere, cloud to edge. Kelsey had a great point, "With this Wasm layer, you can actually have people drop functionality in various languages or in some Wasm compatible thing, and in that situation you can decide does it run in the browser, does it run in your CDN or do you push it all the way back to a serverless platform that supports a Wasm native runtime." Combined with Cosmonic's PaaS, applications are distributed, composed at runtime, and leverages Wasm to run anywhere.
We’re proud to work with Vertex Ventures, our seed round investment partners, to enable us to innovate and bring WebAssembly to any cloud, any edge, at any scale.
Interested in learning more? Check out these great talks:
- KubeCon 2022 NA: Wildly Distributed Wasm
- ARM Summit 2022: Dynamic Routing of Machine Learning Workloads with CNCF wasmCloud and Cosmonic
- Observability Day 2022 NA: The Amazing Trace: OpenTelemetry and wasmCloud
- Cloud Native Wasm Day 2022 EU: Adobe, Wasm Beyond the Browser: Use Cases at Scale
Stay tuned for a more in depth discussion from our engineers!