Fermyon Makes Building and Deploying Wasm Applications Simpler
Fermyon Technologies today added an ability for DevOps teams to both break an application into a set of microservices and create workflows made up of multiple software components to its open-source Spin serverless framework for building WebAssembly applications.
Announced at a WasmCon 2024 conference, Fermyon also revealed it has contributed Spin to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a candidate for being a Sandbox level project. That donation follows the contribution of SpinKube, a serverless framework for building Wasm applications on top of Kubernetes clusters, to the CNCF earlier this year.
Finally, Fermyon has added integrations with other open source tools and frameworks, including OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus and Jaeger, and support for Starling Monkey, a faster JavaScript runtime developed by The Bytecode Alliance provides based on a Spidermonkey engine originally developed by Mozilla.
Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher said the overall goal is to provide platform engineering teams with more control over how Wasm applications are deployed as they simultaneously seek to provide application developers with better experiences.
At the core of that effort is Selective Deployment, which makes it possible for developers to build a single application that can then be converted by DevOps teams into a set of distributed microservices at the time it is deployed. That capability makes it possible for developers to build an application as they prefer, without DevOps teams necessarily having to follow their lead when it comes time to deploy that application, noted Butcher.
A Spin Dependency plugin, meanwhile, now enables Wasm application developers to reference components in registries in a way that creates language bindings more easily. That capability makes it possible to then create workflows spanning multiple components, added Butcher.
These latest advances are all made possible using the WebAssembly Component Model, an update to the core WebAssembly binary code framework that makes it possible to build interoperable Wasm libraries, applications and environments.
It’s not clear how widely Wasm has been adopted, but the expectation is that application developers will be able to routinely build applications that can run anywhere in any programming language they prefer. In time, that will lead to applications that are based on interoperable components that can be mixed and matched without regard for how they were constructed.
The WebAssembly Component Model provides the missing link for achieving that goal using a binary-code format, said Butcher.
In theory at least, the pace at which the next generation of distributed applications will be built and deployed should accelerate as a result. Application developers, in general, are still learning the tools required to build Wasm applications but it’s now more a question of when these applications will begin to be deployed in volume rather than if. Originally founded by Mozilla, Fastly, Intel and Red Hat, the Bytecode Alliance that oversees the development Wasm now counts Microsoft, Amazon, Docker, Arm and Cisco among its members.
The challenge, of course, is that it’s one thing to build an application but it’s generally something else to deploy, update, secure and maintain it.
