What’s Next in WebAssembly?

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome to this special edition of the new stack makers on the road we're here at the open source summit in austin texas discussions from the show floor with technologists giving you their expertise and insights to help you with your everyday work howdy everyone we're deep in the heart of austin texas at the open source summit and i'm right now in at the fermion technologies booth with matt butcher he's ceo and founder of fermion technologies and welcome matt yeah thanks for having me heather we're going to talk today about web assembly and also what fermion is doing in that space and uh how it might be changing the way we do everything in in the cloud native space so um first of all um a lot of people for uh webassembly is fairly new to a lot of people um the definition of the quick definition i've always heard is build once run anywhere do you want to could you give a sort of a thumbnail description yeah yeah i think that's a great place to start uh you know when web assembly was created luke wagner and the other original developers were envisioning it as a compile target where you could compile your favorite programming language and then execute it inside of a web browser so kind of the initial idea was can we extend a web browser beyond just being able to do javascript and into a realm where developers can choose you know i want this language to because it's got this performance profile or i want to do this because it's my favorite programming language you know and really what's happened i think over the last five years we've definitely seen some good usage in the browser i think figma is a good example of that uh but now uh luke and all the rest of us are starting to get excited because we can move it outside of the browser and that sort of write once run anywhere uh motif it really is is amenable to running it inside of everything from proxy servers to video games uh microsoft uses it in flight simulator as a way to write extensions to flight simulator and for us at fermion you know the really exciting part is being able to run it in the cloud as well as a cloud service alongside like virtual machines and containers um at kubecon last month in valencia i um i heard one speaker say in 10 years we won't be talking about kubernetes we will be talking about web assembly um what are some of the but it does seem like it's it's still something kind of early days what do you what do you see as some of the barriers to adoption so far yeah yeah and i don't know about the con the kubernetes part but i certainly believe we're going to be talking about webassembly for a decade or more for sure uh and i think uh what the the original hurdles to web assembly were going to be to kind of find where its sweet spots were and that's what i think we've just kind of overcome we've started to understand yeah it can execute very well in the cloud yahweh the programming languages are very rapidly becoming supportive of webassembly ruby python.net and c-sharp they're all adding support for all these new capabilities in web assembly so we're really seeing the velocity kind of picking up on where this technology you know really what we're talking about now is the realization of the potential that's been around in webassembly for a long time but as people get excited and open source projects start to adopt it then what we're seeing now is like the the beginning of the tidal wave uh and i think that there's still a little bit more work uh to be done to just kind of get get the the environment ready uh and and fermion of course along with other members of the bytecode alliance like intel and fastly and red hat and cosmonic and all of we're all together trying to make sure that that gets done you know this year and then start to build this first wave of applications that really highlight where it can happen for us we're excited because we think this is the next wave of cloud computing and you know we love containers many of us have been involved in the kubernetes ecosystem for years and years i built helm originally and and so you know that's still still in a way this is my baby but but also we're excited because now we're finding solutions to some problems that we didn't see get solved well in the in the container ecosystem and that's why we talk about it as sort of like the next wave you know start with virtual machines now we add containers and now we move over one more and add web assembly and see some new problems and new spaces addressed and solved yeah some of the problems i'm for example um like the developer experience is that is that oh developer experience is a big one for us you know as as as part of the front line in kubernetes you know having worked through the early platform as a service in kubernetes and the helm experience in kubernetes uh developer experience became really important for us and cloud in general has gotten big and complex and we we look at it the word we like to use is frictionless right we feel like development in the cloud should be frictionless for the developer they should be able to use the tools they want to use uh so we worked it like sand off all the bumps and and make it so easy that they can get up and running with their first webassembly based web application or microservice in two minutes or less uh and that's that we feel like is just once you can get going with that experience right once you're like oh yeah i got my first app out there and it only took me a couple minutes i'm gonna try something more complicated oh i can do that too and it didn't take long and i didn't have to learn a whole bunch of new things that's the experience that gets developers excited and then gets them saying okay now i've got a solution that i didn't have before and i'm excited to use it and excited to have my team use it and that's really what we're going for on the developer experience side and security is obviously another issue that that and and that's where web assembly is really ideally suited when we started looking around uh for potential uh technologies that could fill this third wave that we found we kind of identified the gap and then said okay what fits in this gap right we got a keyhole what's the key uh security really has to be done by default and in the browser all these attributes that made webassembly so awesome in the browser are the same kind of attributes we want to see on the cloud side and security is first and foremost in that right we want to have that sandboxed environment because you know you don't want to you don't want to load a web page and have the risk that it can compromise your system right so all these browser technologies are built with that security sandbox in mind and public cloud is very much cloud infrastructure is very much in that same category so what excited us about web assembly is it came with all those features that we really wanted on the cloud side and we didn't have to solve the you know the the the big you know million dollar questions can we get it secure in the cloud and that was solved for us you know when we started using it so yeah great so i understand uh your company has some news this week uh this year yeah we do well this is our first booth ever at a conference and that's exciting in and of itself but we launched our platform which is simply named fermion uh this is the so we a couple months ago we announced the developer tool spin it's the local developer environment where a developer can get up and running in two minutes or less this is the next stage out this is the cloud application platform where the developer can push their application out into production and we're really excited about it it's built on nomad and console to top-tier technologies from hashicorp and we've worked with them a lot in trying to evolve how we can run web assembly on the cloud side in production in these kind of highly scalable environments but consuming very very light amounts of cloud resources so for example uh to install sort of an empty kubernetes cluster you're technically starting at multiple uh you know large instances and that kind of ambiguous virtual machine sizes you start at large and you go up from there uh our our entire uh all of our fermion websites and everything we're running on just a small cluster of t2 small instances so about as small as we can get and still get the network bandwidth coming in that we need and that's very exciting to us because we think that along with you know creating this great developer experience and a secure platform we're also going to help people save money on their cloud costs because cloud costs have just kind of ballooned out of out of control and we think that if we can be really mindful of the resources we use and help the developer understand what it means to write code that can be uh nimble and can be light on resource usage or just they don't even have to understand it right the real objective is to make it so that when they write code it just happens to have those characteristics and then uh you know the cloud bill starts going down and we can monitor our cost a little more effectively and and i think that's a big moon for organizations from you know the smallest startups like us where we're operating on a shoestring budget sometimes to you know large enterprises where they're really saying uh we've really got to cut down these massive line items off of our budgets so it's a good it's like for the managers out there we've got something for you too so um so i know that um i read a blog post on on your site about um the whole issue of serverless and how it's um it's got it had always had some somewhat squishy definition and maybe that's one reason it hasn't been the the serverless it hasn't been it hasn't met its potential it hasn't met his potential and um you describe the what you're building is uh you know a it's in in to some degree it's a serverless platform yeah yeah can you explain what that what that meant one of the things we've heard very consistently from developers over the last few years and we talked to a lot you know many of us came from microsoft talked to many many customers in kubernetes and all the different azure uh platforms and what we heard repeatedly was uh they really like the model right when you can dive straight into business logic and not have to worry about standing up an http server and configuring your ssl certificates and handling interrupts they really liked that idea uh but they were looking for you know a a an open source platform that was very fast and that had great developer tooling and delivered on all of those promises as well yeah and serverless i mean that was the kernel of the idea that the serverless word sort of described and it sort of you know as as some buzzwords do right it got a little nebulous and got a little ambiguous and nobody was quite sure what it meant and and uh consequently people were i think very getting frustrated that it didn't live up to the potential of offering that frictionless developer experience plus the high performance and the ease of deployment uh we feel like as we as we approached this we said no we think we can really fulfill on that original promise we saw with serverless at the beginning of saying we're going to do this it's going to be a delightful experience and developers are going to love this kind of platform if someone wants to sort of dip their toe in the water and get started with webassembly you know you're saying a developer i want i think it has a lot of promise but i want to sort of experiment with it yeah can you see it what sort of project or what sort of use case would be best for that right well what we liked doing we when we got started we said all right let's build a content management system which might not be the best thing for you to start with but we built it and released it as open source so that people could start with something and say oh here's a robust production grade content management system that we know is run in production at fermion and other places let's look at that and see how it was built so that's a fun way to kind of dive in on a with an existing application and then start building it what we're really excited about as far as like the applications that we believe people will write our and and web applications and so we built this game called finicky whiskers there's a game where you've got to feed your cat and the cat's always changing her mind about what she wants and every time she changes her mind you're trying to feed her chicken chicken chicken and then fish fish fish but the objective of building that was to say here's how you can build a group of microservice applications there are seven all together in finicky whiskers that all work together and the you know the shortest one is 20 lines of code the longest one is maybe 100 lines of code so they're all it's all very uh easy to read through they're written in ruby and rust and different languages so you can kind of get a feel for how you build micro service applications in this next wave of cloud computing is that available on your site or is that yeah so every github.com fermion we're like a seven seven month old company but our github repo is full of stuff uh and you can go there you can find finicky whiskers you can find spin the developer platform you can find bartholomew the cms we have a repo called kitchen sink under there that's just lots and lots of different examples of different things you can do and how you would do them uh if someone's more example inclined rather than starting with a tool and building from there that's a great place to start and kind of get going with the new technology cool cool and we and we love we know people love cat content so you know yup yup uh cats are cats are great yeah so so cool um anything else you you want to say about uh what you would you see coming next in the web assembly space yeah i think what we're really there are two big things we see that i think are really exciting one is uh is sort of like horizontal what we're seeing is lots and lots of different applications of webassembly as a core technology so envoy release support for envoy the proxy release support for plug-ins uh you know we're seeing a number of new companies starting up in the space including suborbital and cosmonic and lunatic and and it's exciting and and uh profion's another good example they have started in sort of the trusted computing space and and you're so you're starting to see webassembly the technology applied in a number of very distinct categories and we're excited about that because effectively what that does is it means we will together build a set of tools that can be used to build a whole wide variety of different applications the the other thing i'm really excited about maybe more on the vertical side is that what i think we're going to see here is uh a a real a new way of thinking about writing these kind of complex web applications where some of the technology will be in web assembly and we're excited about being able to write micro services and things like things like that but also we'll still see how docker containers and and containers in general get used in this new ecosystem and i think some of the applications that we're feeling unwieldy and complex are going to start feeling simpler and more intuitive to developers that's terrific well um thank you very much matt for for your time for sharing sharing uh your knowledge with our audience and uh this has been uh the uh tns tns makers on the road segment and uh we'll see you next time if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this you can always subscribe to our youtube channel we're on all the major social media platforms you can always find us at the new stack dot io we hope to see you soon [Music]