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WebAssembly for Platforms

Engineering is costly and cloud infrastructure is expensive.​

Platform teams need to provide a standard set of controls, templates, and processes so developers can work swiftly and securely—and they need to do it all as efficiently as possible.

Unfortunately, scaling and distributing applications on container platforms come with high costs:

costs

  • Platform costs: Idle applications and infrastructure accrue cloud costs, while scaling leads to exponential cost increases. Over 80% of container spend is on idle infrastructure.

  • Engineering costs: In many organizations, around 50% of developer time is spent on maintenance and operations rather than shipping new products or features.

Cosmonic helps platform teams use WebAssembly (Wasm) and wasmCloud to save time and reduce cloud spend:

  • Scale applications to zero with zero cold starts. Use the tiny footprint of WebAssembly to bin pack significantly more workloads on existing hardware.
  • Save developer time with WebAssembly components. Small units of code interoperate with other components written in any other language, dramatically increasing the re-usability of code and restoring time spent on patching dependencies.

Platform engineering with WebAssembly and wasmCloud​

WebAssembly is a bytecode format and virtual instruction set architecture—in other words, a tiny virtual machine for running highly efficient code anywhere.

tiny virtual machine

Developers can...

  • Write code in the language of their choice.
  • Compile the code to WebAssembly without worrying about the operating system or architecture of their deployment environment.
  • Deploy anywhere with a WebAssembly runtime.

Originally developed as the fourth W3C standard for web browsers, joining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, today WebAssembly powers web and desktop software, streaming services, and applications at the edge.

Distributed WebAssembly components with wasmCloud​

The WebAssembly component model enables WebAssembly binaries to interoperate with other components written in any other language. That means libraries from one language can be used by applications written in another—code re-usability increases, and developers can focus on business logic rather than boilerplate code.

components

wasmCloud is a WebAssembly orchestrator hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Using wasmCloud to deploy and run distributed WebAssembly components makes it possible to link components at runtime and leverage the benefits of WebAssembly at scale:

  • Dependencies are decoupled from application code, and components can always be started with the most recent versions of dependencies.
  • Developers don't need to spend time patching dependencies to resolve the latest upstream vulnerability.
  • Applications can be deployed across environments with cross-region, cloud, and edge resiliency.

resiliency

Platforms can achieve...

  • Sub-millisecond start times and vertical auto-scaling for scale-to-zero with zero cold starts.
  • Horizontal scaling with failover and capability-level resilience for reliable, fault-tolerant applications.
  • Deployment and orchestration that spans environments including clouds, datacenters, and edges.

The platform for platform engineering​

Cosmonic makes it easy to adopt and scale wasmCloud on the infrastructure you have today.

Cosmonic Control is a control plane that makes it easy for enterprises to manage and observe distributed applications across any cloud or self-hosted Kubernetes.

Powered by WebAssembly and wasmCloud, Cosmonic Control helps teams separate the scale of the deployment from the cost of the compute. Users have reduced app maintenance by 90% and operational costs by 50%, achieving better margins with increased scale.

app costs