WebAssembly components: the next wave of cloud native computing
Member post by Liam Randall, Cosmonic CEO and CNCF Ambassador and Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic CTO, Bytecode Alliance TSC director, and WASI SG co-chair
The advent of containers marked an inflection point for computing in the 21st century—a paradigm shift (per Thomas Kuhn) that gave rise to the entire cloud native landscape. In 2024, the arrival of WebAssembly components represents a new inflection point, and the next paradigm shift is already underway.
WebAssembly (Wasm) has been around for about a decade now—much as Linux kernel namespaces were in use for over a decade before the debut of Docker (and 15 years before Kubernetes reached the mainstream). Like the Linux namespace, the core WebAssembly standard has provided a firm foundation to build on.
In the case of Wasm, that means we have a bytecode format and virtual instruction set architecture (ISA) that enable us to compile code from any language to a common standard, without needing to build for a particular kernel or architecture. Over the last decade, Wasm’s flexibility has proven itself not only in the browser, but…pretty much everywhere else as well. Today, Wasm is used every where from Amazon Prime Video to Google Earth to Adobe to telecoms like Orange.
