Using WebAssembly Now: It's Easier Than You Think
04-17, 11:40–12:10 (Europe/Amsterdam), The Warehouse

WebAssembly (Wasm) has a misleading name, and an undeserved reputation for leaving real-world applications just out of reach. Turns out, it's come a long way in the server-side ecosystem, and it works great alongside Kubernetes! The not-so-new technology WebAssembly is a platform-agnostic bytecode that produces tiny binaries that run at near-native speed. The benefit of a platform-agnostic technology is that it works just as well outside of containers as it does inside containers, so it can be used for completely greenfield projects or integrate right alongside Kubernetes. This demo heavy talk will start with an overview of Wasm, what it's good for, and what it isn't good for. We will then dive straight into demoing the strengths of Wasm using wasmCloud, a CNCF sandbox application runtime. This demo will span multiple Kubernetes clusters in the cloud and extend outside of Kubernetes to show why this technology is perfect for solving the problems many applications face today.

See also: talk slides (2.1 MB)

Taylor Thomas is an Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the creators of Krustlet and Bindle. He is currently core maintainer of wasmCloud, Bindle, and Krustlet. He is a regular speaker at various open source conferences and meetups, including various KubeCons and local meetup groups. His work at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft spanned various containers and Kubernetes platforms as well as WebAssembly platforms and experimentation. He currently lives in the Utah area in the US and enjoys hiking and camping.

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Brooks is a Lead Software Engineer at Cosmonic, focusing on harnessing WebAssembly to alleviate the pains of modern software development. Brooks started his software development career with Critical Stack, a Kubernetes container orchestration platform that is now open source. He joined Cosmonic to focus on bringing WebAssembly and wasmCloud to the Cloud Native world full-time. He is a proud Rustacean and an advocate of all-things open source.