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WebAssembly, aka Wasm, is already changing how companies deploy Kubernetes, according to Taylor Thomas, a systems engineer and director of customer engineering at Cosmonic. Fortune 100 companies are spinning down Kubernetes Clusters to use Wasm instead, he said.

There will always be a place for Kubernetes, he added — just perhaps not as an ad hoc development platform.

“We’ve seen so many companies in the Fortune 100 who we’ve talked to who are getting rid of Kubernetes teams and spinning down Kubernetes clusters,” Thomas told The New Stack. “It’s just so expensive. It’s so wasteful that the utilization numbers we get from most people are 25 to 35%.”

Kubernetes forces developers to care about infrastructure and they don’t necessarily want to, he added.

“Basically, developers have to care about their infrastructure much more than they need to,” he said. “A lot of these things around microservices, we did them in Kubernetes because that was a great way to do it before we had stuff like WebAssembly, but microservices and functions … all those things work better in a world where WebAssembly exists because you focus just on writing that code.”

WebAssembly, or Wasm, is a low-level byte code that can be translated to assembly. A bytecode is computer object code that an interpreter converts into binary machine code so it can be read by a computer’s hardware processor.

Cosmonic Bets on Open Source

Cosmonic is counting on Wasm winning. In April, the WebAssembly platform-as-a-service company launched its open beta and released Cosmonic Connect, a set of third-party connectors designed to simplify Wasm integration. The first Cosmonic Connect integration to launch was Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes.

“You can now connect Kubernetes clusters with a single command,” he said. “We manage all the Wasm cloud-specific bits. We have a beautiful UI you can use to see and manage these things.”

Cosmonic is also involved in furthering WebAssembly standards, including the proposed component model. With the component model, language silos could be broken down by compiling to Wasm, Thomas said. The function then becomes like Lego blocks — developers could combine functions from different languages into WebAssembly and the functions would work together, he added.

“We’ve been focusing on a common set of contracts that we’ve been using at Wasm cloud for a long time, and we’re now centralizing on in the WebAssembly community called wasi-cloud,” he said. “These things are wasi key value, wasi messaging — [if] you want to use a key-value database in 80% of the use cases, you just need the same five functions — get set, put, all these common things — and so it’s defined by an interface.”

That will allow developers to “click” code from different languages together, he said.

“That language barrier is so incredibly powerful — that really fundamentally changes how we put together applications,” Thomas said. “Because of WebAssembly being able to compile from any language, that thing you’re using could be written in Rust or C, and the thing you’re writing could be in Go or Python, and then they plug together when they actually run.”

That doesn’t just break the language barrier — it can also break down vendor barriers because now everything can be moved around, he added. Components will also liberate developers from being locked into custom software development kits (SDKs) or libraries, he said.

“It’s a walled garden and we don’t want that to be the case. We want it to be you just write against the contracts and we provide the stuff you need for our platform but you just focus on the code part of it,” he said. “That’s very different than all these other approaches where you either had to confine yourself to a specific language or a specific type of way things were set up or any of those kinds of details.”

Cosmonic also is a maintainer on the CNCF project wasmCloud and works with the Wasm cloud application deployment manager [WADM] standard. He compared WADM to running a YAML file.

“WADM gives you the ability to connect to something to use a familiar pattern,” Thomas said. “A user is able to define their application, they can say, Okay, here’s the dependencies I’m using that I’m going to link and at runtime, here’s the configuration I’m passing to it. And here’s the code I’m running. And they can specify all those things where they want to run it, and then it’ll run it everywhere for them, and then automatically reconcile if something disappears, or something moves around.”

Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter who has covered technology issues from data integration to security for 25 years. Before joining The New Stack, she served as the editor of the banking technology site, Bank Automation News. She has...

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