Fermyon to Donate Open Source Wasm Platform to CNCF
At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference today, Fermyon Technologies revealed it has applied to donate an open source platform for building, deploying and managing WebAssembly (Wasm) applications on Kubernetes clusters to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
SpinKube combines the Spin operator, containerd Spin shim, and the runtime class manager, formerly KWasm, to leverage a higher level of abstraction makes it simpler to deploy serverless Wasm applications on Kubernetes clusters. Contributors include Fermyon, Microsoft, SUSE and Liquid Reply.
Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher said as the development of cloud-native applications continues to evolve, Wasm is emerging as the ideal software artifact for building these applications. That’s crucial because the current pace of development of these applications is slow because existing development environments require developers to know too much about how the underlying Kubernetes platform functions as they build their applications.
Addressing that issue will increase the total number of developers that will be inclined to build modern cloud-native applications, Butcher noted.
Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that runs in a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. Originally developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code, WebAssembly is starting to be used to rapidly build lighter-weight applications that can be deployed on any server platform. In effect, the promise of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere is finally being realized some 25 years after the Java programming language was first introduced.
It’s not clear to what degree Wasm might replace existing approaches for building applications any time soon, but it does provide an alternative to serverless computing frameworks for developing lighter-weight applications that typically run faster than a container-based application.
While Kubernetes continues to gain traction in enterprise IT environments, many application developers prefer to build applications using frameworks that abstract away the underlying IT infrastructure much more than what has thus far been made possible in Kubernetes environments. Wasm creates an opportunity to create a framework that achieves that goal in a way that can be deployed on multiple IT platforms, including Kubernetes clusters.
The CNCF now has multiple Wasm projects being advanced under its auspices to make it simpler to build and deploy these applications. At the same time, the ByteCode Alliance is advancing multiple projects that include run-time environments for Wasm applications.
Each organization will need to determine to what degree it wants to deploy Wasm applications on Kubernetes clusters versus other platforms, but for the first time, it is becoming practical to build applications that can run on multiple platforms. It’s still early days in terms of the maturity of Wasm for server-based applications, and it’s not quite apparent yet what types of applications lend themselves best to this format versus other classes of software artifacts. The one thing that is certain is the amount of Wasm code moving through DevOps pipelines is about to significantly increase as it becomes simpler to build and deploy these applications.
