Cosmonic Adds Control Plane for Managing Wasm Infrastructure
Cosmonic today added a control plane that provides IT teams with the ability to dynamically scale IT infrastructure resources allocated to Web Assembly (Wasm) applications as needed.
Based on wasmCloud, an open-source platform for building distributed applications, Cosmonic Control provides IT teams with a framework for optimizing the consumption of IT infrastructure resources via a pane of glass.
Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said Cosmonic Control enables IT teams to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing WASM applications at scale. Later this year Cosmonic plans to make available both self-hosted and managed services editions of the control plane.
Wasm defines a portable binary-code format, along with a corresponding text format for executables that can run in an isolated sandbox on any platform that is being advanced under the auspices of the Bytecode Alliance.
As the original developer of wasmCloud, a distributed computing framework that was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Cosmonic has been at the forefront of building out the distributed computing framework needed to deploy those applications.
Cosmonic Control adds a control plane on top of wasmCloud in addition to optimizing consumption for IT infrastructure resources and also ensures that reusable Wasm components are running in an isolated build chain that makes it simpler to securely update them. It supports Go, TypeScript, Rust / C / C++, with support for Microsoft .NET, Python, and Java plans.
Additionally, Cosmonic Control is integrated with Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Git repositories, OpenID Connect and internal developer platforms (IDPs) such as Backstage. It also comes with hardened Chainguard container images, a software bill of materials (SBOM) and integration with single sign-on (SSO) frameworks.
Cosmonic Control is arriving at a time when there is more focus than ever on securing software supply chains. As a control plane, Cosmonic Control provides a centralized team with more control over how golden Wasm templates are distributed across a heterogeneous computing environment, said Randall.
Additionally, a platform engineering team can leverage Cosmonic Control to ensure IT infrastructure resources are being optimally consumed in an economic era where organizations have become much more sensitive to the total cost of IT, he added.
It’s not clear how broadly Wasm components are being deployed in production environments, but organizations such as American Express have developed their own serverless computing framework based on Wasm. The challenge is making it simpler for developers to build applications based on Wasm components.
Ultimately, however, with support from Microsoft, Docker, Inc., and Amazon, the tooling provided to build Wasm applications will continue to steadily improve.
As is always the case with an emerging technology, the transition to Wasm as an alternative to containers will take time if for no other reason than simple inertia. Wasm applications might be more challenging to build but they have been shown to perform better than container applications. The issue then becomes how to deploy and manage Wasm components alongside all the containers and other legacy applications that have already been deployed.
