11-10, 17:10–17:40 (MST), Theater
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.
Almost every cloud application and infrastructure operates in a virtualized environment today. Understanding virtualization technologies is critical for designing and building cloud applications. This talk focuses on virtualization, beginning with a brief history of classical virtualization—VMs and their role in hardware abstraction and resource optimization in data centers. Then the talk shifts its focus to Docker containers and Kubernetes, highlighting their impact on modern cloud development and deployment. The discussion then delves into emerging technologies like WebAssembly and provides clarity on what this technology is, offering a clear comparison of these technologies. This talk aims to empower developers, practitioners, and operators to optimize cloud resources efficiently, ensuring secure and effective deployment of applications across diverse platforms and hardware.
Jiaxiao (Joe) Zhou is a Software Engineer at Microsoft. He is on the Azure Container Upstream team and works on bringing WebAssembly to the cloud through projects like "runwasi", "SpiderLightning", and "containerd-wasm-shims". He is a Recognized Contributor to the Bytecode Alliance and made contributions to many Wasm upstream projects, and has been a champion for a few WASI proposals under the umbrella "wasi-cloud-core"
Danilo (Dan) Chiarlone is a Software Engineer at Microsoft, a core maintainer of Hyperlight, and a champion of seven WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) proposals. He is the author of Server-Side WebAssembly and an advocate for Wasm's role in cloud computing, security, and serverless technologies.