11-04, 17:05–17:35 (US/Central), ROOM 1
Web assembly, or Wasm, is shaping up to have a huge impact on the future of cloud computing. As Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker, said "If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is."
In this talk, we take a look at some of the parallels between the evolution of the container ecosystem and that of Wasm, focusing in particular on the foundational technology of the operating system. CoreOS established the concept of a container Linux - what is the equivalent for the Wasm world?
In more detail, this talk will cover: What is Wasm and why are people excited about it? What are some of the challenges with developing and deploying Wasm? We consider the evolution of the container ecosystem starting in 2013 with Docker and CoreOS, and compare with where Wasm is today. Then, focusing on the operating system itself, we show how the Flatcar project, leveraging the latest system extension capabilities of systemd, can be used as the basis of an immutable Wasm-optimized Linux, incorporating all the key Wasm runtime components for a simplified development and manageable deployment experience.
Andy is passionate about technology and believes successful businesses deliver solutions and services that delight customers, the open source community and ecosystem partners.
Andy joined the Azure team at Microsoft through the acquisition of Kinvolk, where he was chief commercial officer. Prior to joining Kinvolk, Andy co-founded Tigera and Calico, the foundational open source cloud native networking and network security project. Andy previously as successfully built and grown businesses in the areas of network protocols, voice over IP and web conferencing at Metaswitch. He holds a joint MBA from Berkeley-Haas and Columbia Business Schools. He also has masters degrees in software engineering, philosophy and mathematics from the Universities of Oxford and Stirling.
Ralph Squillace is a Prinicipal Product Manager in the Azure Core Upstream group at Microsoft. He's old, having joined Microsoft in the OLE32 group -- before COM, just after Win16 graduated to Win32. Since then he's worked in component development in .NET, WCF (SOAP for professionals!), and several Azure Services. An early advocate for Linux at Microsoft, he spent the last twelve container years helping the Helm project, supporting https://porter.sh and https://cnab.io, and others. For the past two or more years he's led Microsoft open-source efforts in WebAssembly at the ByteCode Alliance Foundation, focusing on the Wasm System Interface, Wasm Components, and language integrations. @ralph_squillace.