Cloud-Native WebAssembly: Containerization On the Edge

Web Assembly Runtime is a solution to the pain points of cloud native infrastructure. It is small, fast, scalable, secure, and portable across different platforms and programming languages. It enables new types of application architectures and has near-native runtime performance. It is fully supported by Kubernetes and can run side by side with Linux containers. It also integrates with Dapper, a framework designed to help people design microservices.

• Web Assembly Runtime solves the problems of cloud native infrastructure
• It is small, fast, scalable, secure, and portable
• It enables new types of application architectures and has near-native runtime performance
• It is fully supported by Kubernetes and can run side by side with Linux containers
• It integrates with Dapper, a framework designed to help people design microservices

Web Assembly Runtime is a thousand times faster than traditional Linux container images and has a startup time of sub-milliseconds. It enables applications that only run when requests come in and shut down as soon as the request goes away, making it more scalable. It is also secure by default because it is an application that you write, and it does not drag in the operating system and its libraries. It has a very small attack surface, making it secure. It is completely portable across different platforms and programming languages, making it like the JVM. It is cross-platform, and you can access the media's GPU with just the web for some extensions. It is fully supported by Kubernetes and integrates with Dapper, a framework designed to help people design microservices.

The Linux container is a critical innovation that drives cloud-native applications. Developers are now deploying containerized applications outside of cloud centers on edge networks (e.g., serverless functions on CDNs), on edge devices (e.g., smart cars), and on SaaS (including databases) as embedded functions. In those use cases, the Linux container, with guest OS and support software, is too heavy, too slow, and not portable enough. WebAssembly (WASM) has emerged as a lightweight runtime for those applications. The WasmEdge Runtime and crun projects work together to make WASM a first-class citizen in the container ecosystem, running side by side with Linux containers in a single cluster, managed by existing container tools. In this talk, Michael will discuss how WASM fits into the container ecosystem, how to use container tools (e.g., CRI-O and containerd) to start WASM images, and how edge-optimized Kubernetes (e.g., KubeEdge / SuperEdge / OpenYurt) manage WASM applications.