With WasmEdge to New Shores

WebAssembly and Kubernetes have a lot of potential for use cases beyond the browser, but there are still some limitations and challenges to overcome.

• WebAssembly can run alongside existing technologies and has good adoption possibilities
• It has a small resource footprint and is highly secure, but not all programming languages are supported
• Kubernetes can extend the use of WebAssembly beyond the browser, but there are still some harmonization issues to be resolved
• WebAssembly is not suitable for heavy lifting applications and will not replace containers
• WebAssembly and Kubernetes together have a lot of potential for the future

The speaker provided a demo showing how easy it is to utilize WebAssembly in a Kubernetes cluster, but also noted that it can take some time to get started with it and install all the necessary tools.

WebAssembly aka WASM is migrating from a portable enclosed browser runtime to process serious backend tasks. What makes it so interesting is the fact that the WASM container is secure, efficient, portable and fast - at least on the paper it looks like the better implementation of containers. However, this abilities make WASM very attractive to be utilized in environments with limit capabilities on security isolation, resources and computing power. We will look into how to get started with WasmEdge and implement a simple application to talk to. Then we will discover the behavior of WasmEdge, and which use cases we can derive from it. And finally where are the limits and critically question if implementations like WasmEdge are really the future.