Open Source Summit North America 2023

Web Assembly has started gather praise in a browser carrying benefits of performance gains, type safety, reduced size, polyglot support, and with a platform agnostic binary. WASM has largely delivered on its promise in a browser and in Apps, but what about for microservices? We didn’t know either so we tried to build a simple project that seemed fun and learned WASM for microservices is not as mature and a bit more complicated than running in the browser. If WASM, WASI, or WAGI is either interesting or is 100% a foreign concept, we will talk about what we tried, our vision for a fun reusable codebase, and every stumbling block. Discuss the reason why the current WASM seemed not quite mature yet for a common problem statement. More importantly, why we’re still excited for the prospect of WASM in the service space as the platform evolves. Why come to a talk about a failing project? Simple, everyone is going to want some sort of polyglot cooperative, CPU agnostic, cloud native, kubernetes native, and GitOps inclusive solution, and right now it definitely seems like WASM is leading the way, shining a bright beacon ahead like none other. Come learn from our pain so you don’t have too and leave just as excited as we are while informed for the key indicators just beyond the horizon.