Is WASM there yet?

WASM, Civo navigate and community

Sep 17, 2023

Those who have been there with me this year and following the stuff I have been doing, you know that I have been advocating WebAssembly at various places, talking about cloud native Webassembly, working on content to be released soon (written and video). But, the most asked question to me is “Is wasm there yet?“.

In my recent talks, I have been focusing on clearing out the hype and putting out some actual things happening in this space. I would like to share some of them here as well:

WASM in browsers - WASM as a technology is already successful and you can see its success in the web space - Photoshop, Google earth, Figma and MANY more!
WASM and AI - The AI inferencing using WASM is becoming popular and it is actually beneficial. Wasmedge added support for it and Fermyon launched their AI offering in the cloud where you can run the ML inferencing using their cloud. See this example from Michal Yuan(CEO of SecondState) where you can see the object detection when you pass an image to it.
Few things to note here is that there are Zero python dependencies, Whole app is < 2MB, easily deploy using Kubernetes, platfrom agnostic. So AI inferencing in WASM can be very powerful. Consider reading about WASI-NN as well to see how it actually works where you have WASI-NN, WASM runtime, WASM module.
WASM and Kubernetes - With the help of shims, its now easily possible to configure your EXISTING Kuberentes cluster to configure them in such a way they they are able to run WASM workloads. This also eliminates they hype and add practical sense to it as it eliminates the hard dev experience and you get to use the similar tooling for your new set of apps that you can run as WASM modules on your same infra, same cluster. With recent runwasi release you can actually run a wasm and linux container inside a same pod! how cool is that? Again opens up many use-cases.
WASM conferences - Education was a big challenge → WASMcon, WASMI/O, WASM wave India, content creators and WASM oriented organizations are creating tons of study material for people to build apps.
WASM tooling - Dylibso recently announced their observability solution(Observe SDK) which is dope, Fermyon got spin as a framework to create and deploy WASM workloads. Componentize-Py to write components in python with dependencies that use native extensions.
Component Model - Everyone has been excited about the component model and its at final stages of completion and this actually multi-folds the excitement in the community with the possibilities it opens up.
Innovation - Many existing companies are experimenting with WASM and creating offerings, new companies in the WASM ecosystem solving the complex challenges is also growing fast.
Cloud native WASM landscape - Newly launched cloud native WASM landscape shows theadoption of technology, $57B funding and innovation being made in this area.
I Hope reading all these points will make you rethink if WASM is still a hype, NO it’s not and its like the early Docker days and it will SUCCEED.

What Am I doing?

I was at Civo Navigate, it was amazing meeting cloud native folks talking cloud native, WebAssmbly and doing my sessions and workshops. We at Civo are working hard to get new amazing stuff out. Had a really nice round circle discussion with Kelsey on open source and license changes. Next Feb, we are coming to Austin, so be ready, submit the CFP and get ready for another dope edition.

Kubeday India is happening in December and I am very excited about it.

KubeCon India as been announced and people are going crazy in India and showing so much love <3

As I mentioned previously, I am working on WASM content in coming weeks and excited for it to be launched soon! Let’s get to the awesome community content.

Awesome Reads:

Open source for sustainability - A good report to read if you are interested in sustainability.

Profiling Kubernetes Controllers With pprof - Kubernetes controllers extend the capabilities of Kubernetes and that is the most widely used concept in Kubernetes when you want to have your won set of watch loops and objects to enhace Kubernetes experience eg Cert-manager, crossplane, prometheus and many more common applications. You can profile these controllers using pprof and in this blog you can learn how easily it can be done.
opts := ctrl.Options{
// additional options
PprofBindAddress: "127.0.0.1:8081",
}
mgr, err := ctrl.NewManager(ctrl.GetConfigOrDie(), opts)
if err != nil {
setupLog.Error(err, "unable to start manager")
os.Exit(1)
}
How to run WebAssembly/WASI application (Spin) with Dapr on Kubernetes - Series of post diving into the world of WASM, DAPR. With the latest 0.9.0 containerd-shim release this blog shows running sidecar DAPR alongside spin application is shown here and there are many other use-cases like that, that can come up.
Dealing with Missing Time Series in Prometheus - Nice article on dealing with missing metrics in prometheus, it discuss on why they might miss, the problesm they cause and what can be done about it.
Kubernetes Legacy Package Repositories Will Be Frozen On September 13, 2023 - Use the new package repo pkgs.k8s.io which replace the legacy Google-hosted package repositories: apt.kubernetes.io and yum.kubernetes.io.
Introducing Grafana Beyla: open source ebpf auto-instrumentation for application observability - an open source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool that reports span information for basic transactions as well as RED metrics (Rate-Errors-Duration) for both Linux HTTP/S and gRPC services — all without requiring any code modification to manually insert probes.

Awesome resources/repos

sqlsync- SQLSync is a collaborative offline-first wrapper around SQLite. It is designed to synchronize web application state between users, devices, and the edge.
Bacalhau - Compute over Data framework for public, transparent, and optionally verifiable computation.
TTS - 🐸💬 - a deep learning toolkit for Text-to-Speech, battle-tested in research and production