Yeah, I feel that - everything was so green in the beginning that getting a Hello World together was painful. When I started, I was still at a big bank, and there wasn't even an IDL selected, so we just started building with SMITHY. Then adopting WIT, etc...
I would say now, especially with AI and Rust, it is night and day. I think as folks come to the conclusion that they care more about what gets built than the how it is done, they start to feel the need for a sandbox. So, WASI P3 is coming along at a really fortunate time. I haven't had any issue nearly oneshotting things directly into wasm with claude.
I appreciate the suggestion on good communities doing it well.
I don't think it's fair to say this work has happened in the shadows. I work on CNCF wasmCloud, and I know how hard we try to make this content available.
I mean this, though - what else would you like to see to try and make the content and process more accessible? Are there communities that are doing this really well that we could use for inspiration?
On the CNCF wasmCloud Community call this week we played with this:
- a demonstration of Endive
- implemented CNCF wasmCloud host
- Integrated into Vert.x as an example
Oh man, we have struggled with this- and I wrote the copy under the Build / Compose / Run tab to try and surface what we felt were the most salient points.
For WebAssembly Components- we have tiny, portable code, with a standard ABI that lets us compose between languages. For execution, 50 ns start time means that you can start on demand 'with no cold starts'; the converse is true - scaling to zero.
Because you can scale it and run it only when you need to you can be more reliable (run it in more places) while still operating in a cost efficient way.
It's a subtle story that can be hard to communicate. Thank you for the feedback, we're always trying to do better.
One of the absolute highlights of my trip to Kubecon 2022 NA was a fireside chat hosted by Vertex Ventures with Docker CEO Scott Johnston and Kelsey Hightower. The conversation immediately turned to wasm, and in an incredible conversation, Scott and Kelsey discuss where wasm is today, why developers were adopting wasm, and what the future might hold. For those looking to understand Dockers recent announcement for Wasm support, I think this conversation can give you some insight.
Hey, it's a gigantic tent and their is room for all kinds of approaches. wasm and wasmCloud both work great on their own and can go to a lot of places that k8s can't - non Linux OS's and places where we don't even think in terms of process (ie the browser).
WebAssembly really gives us two degrees of portability:
1. CPU / OS / Execution portability; as standard way to package code.
2. A deny by default _security_ model that works the same across all of these different platforms.
This is Liam, co-founder of wasmCloud, founder of Cosmonic, and co-chair of the CNCF Cloud Native Wasm Day.
I don't think this is actually as crazy as it sounds - when we designed the messaging around CNCF, container, and WebAssembly we deliberately went with a better together story.
Why?
In a large enterprises you have huge systems that each represent a variety of concerns - security, compliance, governance, reputation, etc, etc. These systems show up as stakeholders in software development like gates in CI/CD.
Starting with something like wasmCloud inside a container today lets enterprises leverage their existing benefits while still achieving _many_of the benefits of WebAssembly and wasmCloud. wasmCloud publishes docker containers, helm charts, and integrations with service mesh for that reason.
Start where your users are today and take them where you want to go.
I would say now, especially with AI and Rust, it is night and day. I think as folks come to the conclusion that they care more about what gets built than the how it is done, they start to feel the need for a sandbox. So, WASI P3 is coming along at a really fortunate time. I haven't had any issue nearly oneshotting things directly into wasm with claude.
I appreciate the suggestion on good communities doing it well.