Day Two Cloud 183: How Did We Get To WebAssembly And What Is It For?

WebAssembly (Wasm) is an up-and-coming technology that’s probably going to fall into the lap of operations folks. WebAssembly is basically a specification on how to compile things to a bytecode format and how to execute that bytecode. On today’s Day Two Cloud we start to peel the onion on what WebAssembly, what it’s used for, and why you might want to get your hands on it. Our guest is Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon Technologies, a self-confessed Wasm fanatic. He compares WebAssembly to a Java Virtual Machine but with new features, particularly around security, that make it worth investigating. We discuss: * WebAssembly and what it does * Server-side vs. client-side execution * Use cases for Wasm * Wasm performance challenges * More Takeaways: Wasm isn’t applicable everywhere How serverless could look if we could streamline the startup aspects of it Try it! WASM is going to catch on quickly, so get oriented Sponsor: CDN77 Why should you care about CDN77? To retain those 17 out of 20 people who click away due to buffering. CDN77 is a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) optimized for video and backed by skilled 24-by-7 support. Go to cdn77.com/packetpushers to get your free, unlimited trial. Show Links: @technosophos – Matt Butcher on Twitter Matt Butcher on LinkedIn Fermyon Blog JavaScript: The First 20 Years – Zenodo Runwasi – GitHub Sigstore Docker Desktop with WASM – Docker Fermyon Quickstart – Fermyon Create WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) node pools in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to run your WebAssembly (WASM) workload (preview) – Microsoft Transcript: [00:00:01.130] – Ethan Why should you GG you care about CDN 77 to retain those 17 out of 20 people who click away due to buffering. CDN 77 is a global content delivery network optimized for video and backed by skilled 24/7 support. Visit CDN 77 dot slash packet pushers to get your free unlimited trial. [00:00:33.690] – Ethan Welcome to day two. Cloud. And today’s topic is WASM that is web assembly. It’s a topic that Ned and I have hit on before on day two cloud. And we’re going to go deep today. Well, we’re going to talk for a long time and it’s going to seem duty. And at the same time Ned, it feels like we barely scratched the surface. [00:00:51.030] – Ned It really does feel that way. I think we almost hit an hour with this one and we could have gone for another 2 hours because the topic is just broad ranging. And Matt Butcher, who’s our guest, is just a very engaging speaker to begin with. So what I got out of it was WebAssembly is an up and coming technology. It’s probably going to fall into your lap as an operational person at some point. So you should definitely bone up on it now so you’re ready for when it happens. [00:01:19.210] – Ethan As Ned said. Our guest is Matt Butcher.