Virtualization is ubiquitous in the modern cloud era, and understanding virtualization is crucial for building cloud applications. One of the emerging virtualization technologies is WebAssembly, which has been claimed as the third wave of compute, alongside virtual machines and containers. This talk explores the history and evolution of virtualization, and the audience will learn how virtual machines, containers and WebAssembly work. This talk will compare and contrast different virtualization technologies, highlighting their unique strengths and weaknesses by focusing on four critical areas of virtualization:

• Resource utilization
• Portability and manageability
• Application deployment
• Security

Attendees will have a deeper understanding of classical virtualization and delve into a more unfamiliar world of WebAssembly, and know how to leverage on the strengths of each technology and make informed decisions about their usage in various scenarios.