Server-side Wasm boosts K8s bonds, devx ahead of key update

Cosmonic builds Kubernetes on-ramp to Wasm

Whether it's a love-hate relationship or not, most developers still likely have a relationship with Kubernetes. That's why the first Cosmonic Connect module for Cosmonic's WasmCloud PaaS -- in public beta as of this week -- sets up a link between Wasm and Kubernetes, said Taylor Thomas, director at Cosmonic.

"Kubernetes was an obvious target just because of its popularity," he said. "Even if [an organization] is very forward-looking, they're not going to have the time nor the desire to move everything off of Kubernetes right now. … It basically introduces an easy path to the Strangler pattern."

There are so many pain points for developers on Kubernetes that they have an incentive to try this out.

Ultimately, some applications will remain on containers and Kubernetes, and it's also important to manage both together, Taylor said. Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes adds Kubernetes pods inside WasmCloud that allow containerized apps to connect with Wasm apps via the platform's NATS centralized messaging framework.

Cosmonic also invoked a Kubernetes-style declarative pattern for deploying apps on WasmCloud with a second project unveiled this week named Wadm, based on the CNCF's Open Application Model, he said.

For the kind of extremely early adopters already working with Wasm, Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes and Wadm aren't necessary but will be nice to have, according to Sean Isom, senior engineering manager at Adobe.

"These are things that you could have configured manually, but it would have been very difficult to do," Isom said. "Cosmonic Connect allows you to access Kubernetes resources through the Cosmonic PaaS but also makes it easier to set it up with Kubernetes as well."

This kind of platform flexibility is in keeping with PaaS offerings that have emerged in the Kubernetes era, post-Cloud Foundry, which have taken a less-opinionated and highly abstracted approach to the underlying infrastructure, Volk said.

"That's what didn't work in Cloud Foundry," he said. "Nobody liked that part because you were so restricted."

Fermyon focuses on FaaS, devx

Still, some segments of developers prefer to do minimal infrastructure management using serverless platforms. This is where Fermyon's Spin PaaS has focused on a smooth developer experience and emphasized support for Wasm in multiple programming languages, including Python and TypeScript. Outside of Fermyon, programming language support for Wasm has so far been essentially limited to Rust.

"The C++ ecosystem has very robust support [for Wasm] and they kind of started there, but Rust is the de facto standard for Wasm at this point," said Ricardo Torres, associate technical fellow and chief engineer of open source and cloud native at Boeing. "Fermyon seems to have really tried to emphasize additional languages -- for example, it has an SDK for TypeScript, which is pretty huge for the ecosystem."

This week, Fermyon also added a thin layer of infrastructure in the form of ephemeral key-value storage for developers to use for session data. But generally, Fermyon represents the second of two early approaches to server-side Wasm. Where Cosmonic operates similarly to a traditional PaaS, Fermyon has more in common with function as a service (FaaS) tools such as AWS Lambda.

As with PaaS and FaaS, these two models will likely persist as equally valid alternatives while server-side Wasm advances, Isom said.

"The team I represent within Adobe is a platform service provider, so Kubernetes is part of our value-add," he said. "But I can see a world where both WasmCloud and Fermyon coexist."

IT pros await WASI preview 2

Boeing won't be an early adopter of server-side Wasm, but Torres said he sees potential in the technology as a speedier means of spinning up functions from a cold start and to be more efficient than Kubernetes for edge and IoT devices.

Still, while server-side Wasm hype has been building, it has yet to reach a breakthrough, in Torres' view.

"I feel like Wasm is still waiting for its killer app -- its Kubernetes moment," he said.

Such a moment -- or at least a major steppingstone to it -- could come with WASI preview 2, due out later this year, according to Bailey Hayes, a director at Cosmonic and director of the Technical Standards Committee at ByteCode Alliance, which governs WASI.

WASI maintainers expect to reach stability milestones in preview 2 for wasi-cloud, which is a collection of WASI proposals that provide standardized plugin interfaces, or components, for running cloud-native apps on Wasm. Components are a lighter-weight, more portable alternative to the existing WASI modules, which include cumbersome dependencies, Bailey said during a presentation at the Wasm I/O 2023 conference in March.

The component model will significantly broaden the applications that can work with Wasm by supporting a mix of programming languages in the same infrastructure platform, Isom said.

"This continues to be the challenge, as well as an opportunity, for me with Wasm -- being able to build more complex, more robust systems," he said. "Once they get this developer experience sorted out, so that large companies like us can write a service that runs natively in WebAssembly, either on the edge or on the back end, I think we're on the cusp of being able to do great things with it."

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @PariseauTT.