webassembly: the new kubernetes?

WINGOLOG.ORG

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform, allowing you to scale and manage the infrastructure that runs your applications. In quite a short space of time it has become something of an industry standard - everyone is using it!

This blog post does a great job of comparing the core capabilities of WebAssembly to the Linux kernel foundations that support Kubernetes, processes plus private namespaces. However, as a foundation, WebAssembly has a number of advantages due to its lightweight nature and robust security model.

Is WebAssembly the new Kubernetes? No. But it is quite likely that the new Kubernetes will be built on top of WebAssembly.

Introduction to WebAssembly components

RADU-MATEI.COM

The WebAssembly Component Model is a new initiation that seeks to build on WASI (WebAssembly System Interface), to make it easier to create WebAssembly components by defining how they interact together. This blog post introduces some of the concepts and gives an example, linking a WebAssembly module (written in Rust) with a C++ application.

15x Faster TypedArrays: Vector Addition in WebAssembly

JOTT.LIVE

I’ve covered WebAssembly performance a number of times in the past, and the general results indicate that (1) JavaScript is fast, reaching near-native speeds, and (2) WebAssembly isn’t much faster. What you typically achieve with WebAssembly is a consistent execution speed, JavaScript is optimised at runtime and this has an overhead. However, in some instances you can achieve significant performance advantages with WebAssembly.

This fantastic blog post looks at the task of vector addition, comparing JavaScript, WebAssembly (via Emscripten), SIMD and finally the author’s own optimised compiler. The results are impressive, with the end results x15 faster than JavaScript.

w2c2 - Compile WebAssembly modules to C

GITHUB.COM

This project provides tooling for compiling WebAssembly modules to C, allowing you to execute WebAssembly in environments that lack a suitable WebAssembly runtime (perhaps due to resource consraints). This is an early-stage project, but lots of interesting chat and activity in the issues.

Announcing the alpha availability of WebAssembly Plugins

ISTIO.IO

Istio is a number of projects and application that uses WebAssembly as a plugin model, allowing third-parties to run code within the safe and sandboxed WebAssembly runtime. This blog post gives a good overview of the Istio plugin model which has recently reached alpha stage.