Cloud Native Apps with Server-Side WebAssembly

The rise of WebAssembly and its potential to address challenges in today's computing environment

• WebAssembly can address challenges in portability, security, and application architecture diversity
• WebAssembly allows for auto discovery and resolution outside of local leaf nodes
• WebAssembly enables separation of business logic and topology, and runtime topology changes
• WebAssembly can be used in diverse execution environments and can improve system security

The presenter demonstrated the ability of WebAssembly to auto failover to AWS when the GCP path became unhappy in a Kubernetes distribution. They also deployed running code to audience members to demonstrate the separation of business logic and topology, and the ability to plug in lego blocks anywhere. They used the Java Pet Store as an example of a simple application that can become increasingly complex. They also showed how WebAssembly can be used to satisfy requests locally and route requests locally when possible.

Server-side WebAssembly has the potential to increase security, extend application portability, and simplify cloud-native applications when operated in the Kubernetes ecosystem. This talk explores the pros and cons of different deployment models - embedded in a container, native execution, or embedded into other components. We will demonstrate the power that WebAssembly brings to even those projects hosted in traditional containers. This talk features a live build, compilation, deployment, and operation of reference applications. Featuring wasmCloud, Krustlet, and Envoy.