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Tag: WebAssembly

Dylibso Releases Tool for Tracking and Validating Wasm Modules

Dylibso today made generally available a system of record for tracking, investigating, searching and validating modules built using the WebAssembly (Wasm) binary instruction format.

Fresh from raising $6.6 million in additional funding, Dylibso CEO Steve Manuel said Modsurfer exposes the internal contents to enable developers to debug Wasm modules and ensure compatibility with runtime environments.

Modsurfer provides development teams with a console for accessing a fully auditable database of modules indexed for search and debugging. In addition, development teams have the ability to extract critical information from binary formats in a way that can be integrated with DevOps pipelines. In effect, Modsurfer provides application development teams with X-ray vision into previously opaque Wasm modules, said Manuel.

Dylibso previously developed Extism, an open source universal plug-in system that supports multiple programming languages used to build Wasm modules. That reduces the level of effort required to integrate Wasm modules and provided the foundation upon which Modsurfer was created, noted Manuel.

Wasm, at its core, is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) drove the development of Wasm as part of an effort to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code. Wasm is now being extended beyond browsers and JavaScript to enable developers to create a set of universal binaries that could work on any platform without modification.

That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. One of the issues of that approach is that it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application.

It may be some time before WASM becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are finally starting to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. That’s not only critical in terms of overall application developer productivity; it also has major implications in terms of streamlining the management of DevOps workflows as it becomes easier to both initially deploy applications and continuously update them.

As organizations continue to review their application development practices to better secure software supply chains, it’s also become apparent that legacy approaches to building applications are fundamentally flawed. Rather than attempting to reengineer processes to encourage developers to better secure applications, it may be more effective to change the way applications are built. After all, considering all the processes required to secure legacy development approaches, it may be cheaper and easier to adopt a new method for building applications that lowers overall risk, said Manuel.

Of course, the amount of Wasm expertise that exists in the developer community is still limited. However, DevOps teams should expect to see more Wasm modules moving through DevOps pipelines as Wasm tooling continues to improve.

March 23, 2023
Fiberplane Adds Wasm Plug-in Framework for DevOps Notebook

Fiberplane today announced it is extending the reach of a real-time collaboration notebook designed for DevOps teams by making available tools for building plug-ins based on the WebAssembly (Wasm) framework.

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Fiberplane CEO, said these plug-ins, dubbed providers, will make it much simpler for anyone to connect the Fiberplane notebook to other DevOps tools and platforms.

The Fiberplane notebook uses the same operational transformation algorithm used in Google Docs to enable teams to easily collaborate around a document or spreadsheet. The core platform itself is built in Rust and WebAssembly. That approach enables a DevOps team to, for example, write and run PromQL queries and display Prometheus charts alongside other data presented via an integrated graph. Wasm makes it possible to run those providers both in the browser and on a backend platform.

Fiberplane also announced it is open sourcing its Provider Development Kit (PDK), written in Rust, to enable organizations or third-party developers to create additional plug-ins. A Fiberplane Daemon then executes the plug-ins. The overall goal is to provide an open format based on Wasm for consuming DevOps data, noted Hernandez van Leuffen.

The full open source Fiberplane WebAssembly-based Plugin System includes a Fp-bindgen to provide the bindings generator for building plug-ins, the Provider Development Kit (PDK), a toolchain for building plug-ins, a set of pre-configured plug-ins for Prometheus, ElasticSearch, Sentry, Grafana Loki, Cloudwatch and a generic HTTP provider, the Fiberplane command line interface and the Fiberplane Daemon.

Fiberplane is essentially taking the concept of notebooks used for collaboration by data science teams and applying it to DevOps workflows. The goal is to improve DevOps teams’ productivity by reducing the amount of time it takes to sort through multiple types and classes of DevOps data to resolve an issue.

As IT environments become more distributed in the age of the cloud and microservices, troubleshooting issues now invariably spans the responsibilities of multiple members of an IT team. Fiberplane, in effect, makes it possible to spin up a virtual war room that enables the members of an IT organization to collaborate until the issue of the moment is resolved.

The speed at which any IT issue is resolved has become a crucial metric. Given the complexity of IT environments, it’s inevitable that incidents will arise. Ideally, IT teams would discover those issues before they disrupt the business. However, in reality, the metrics organizations use to evaluate the effectiveness of a DevOps team are often how quickly IT issues are resolved once they are discovered. The longer it takes for a distributed DevOps team to marshal its resources, the more likely it becomes that team will be perceived as being inefficient—regardless of what level of application availability is actually achieved.

Most DevOps teams have, of course, implemented a wide range of incident management best practices that create a level of muscle memory for responding to a wide range of issues. The trouble is there will always be unforeseen issues that arise. DevOps teams, as a result, need to find ways to quickly focus on an unpredictable issue that they didn’t anticipate.

February 15, 2023
Best of 2022: We Must Kill ‘Dinosaur’ JavaScript | Microsoft Open Sources 3D Emoji

As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: JavaScript is a bloated barrier to progress, and Microsoft’s emoji are on GitHub. (more…)

December 30, 2022
CNCF Survey Predicts Growing Wasm Momentum

A survey of 93 developers conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found more than a quarter (28%) are using WebAssembly (Wasm) in their cloud-native development projects, with another 36% planning to do so during the next six to 12 months.

The survey, published this week, is effectively a straw poll that found 42% of respondents are developing or plan to develop server-side applications using Wasm, while 48% are combining or planning to combine server-side workloads with client-side applications.

Originally developed five years ago by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code, Wasm is now starting to be used to rapidly build lighter-weight applications that can be deployed on any server platform. The promise of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere is finally being realized some 25 years after the initial introduction of the Java programming language.

The survey found 70% of respondents viewed Wasm runtimes as a disruptive emerging technology. The primary programming languages used in association with Wasm are Rust (59%), Go (47%) and JavaScript (46%), the survey found.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) said they are both porting new applications using Wasm and migrating existing workloads, compared to 37% who said they were creating new applications only. The primary reason cited for migrating workloads to Wasm was application portability (78%), better security (77%) and improved runtime performance (70%).

Security ranks high because existing approaches to building applications rely on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. As a result, it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application. Wasm code runs in a sandboxed environment that isolates execution environments in a way that eliminates the ability of malware to laterally move across an application environment.

Target platforms for Wasm applications include serverless computing frameworks (63%), edge platforms (54%) and the web (52%), the survey found.

The biggest barriers to adoption were tools (46%) and lack of standards (45%). Just over half (56%) of respondents said Wasm developer tools are missing features and are difficult to use. A full 81% said they would like to see vendors provide full-featured and stable Wasm tools and projects.

Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, a provider of a platform for building Wasm applications, said that while survey respondents most likely represented more advanced developers, it’s clear Wasm momentum is starting to build. Much like JavaScript before it, Wasm is about to jump from the client to server-side application environments, he noted.

Less clear is whether Wasm represents the next era of cloud-native computing or is simply another type of software artifact that will be employed to build applications alongside other artifacts such as containers.

Wasm isn’t necessarily going to replace existing approaches for building applications any time soon, but it does provide an alternative to serverless computing frameworks for developing lighter-weight applications that run faster. Existing serverless computing frameworks typically use containers that are much slower to start up than Wasm code running natively on a platform, which accounts for why developers are looking to embrace the format to improve overall application performance.

One way or another, more Wasm code will soon be finding its way into DevOps pipelines. The issue is determining how to incorporate it alongside all the other code moving through those pipelines.

October 28, 2022
Fermyon Adds Managed PaaS for Building Wasm Applications

Fermyon Technologies this week launched a hosted platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, dubbed Fermyon Cloud, that promises to make it simpler to build WebAssembly (Wasm) applications.

Announced during the Cloud Native Wasm Day event during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference, Fermyon Cloud is now available in open beta.

Fresh from raising $20 million in funding, Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher said IT teams can quickly build and deploy Wasm applications using a Fermyon Spin development tool and a Fermyon Platform the company launched earlier this year.

Fermyon Cloud adds an opinionated PaaS environment managed by Fermyon that can start up Spin applications in less than a millisecond. It uses a serverless application programming interface (API) that makes it possible to cache and optimize applications as they are loaded, noted Butcher.

Originally developed more than five years ago by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code, Wasm is now used to rapidly build lighter-weight applications that can be deployed on any server platform. In effect, the promise of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere is finally being realized some 25 years after the initial introduction of the Java programming language.

Wasm isn’t necessarily going to replace existing approaches for building applications, at least not any time soon, but it does provide an alternative to serverless computing frameworks for developing lighter-weight applications that run faster.

In addition, at a time when organizations are becoming more concerned about application security, the appeal of Wasm is clear. Existing approaches to building applications rely on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. As a result, it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application. In contrast, Wasm code runs in a sandboxed environment that isolates execution environments to eliminate the ability of malware to laterally move across an application environment.

Wasm is especially well-suited for building lightweight applications that previously might have been deployed on a serverless computing framework, noted Butcher. The issue developers are encountering when using a serverless computing framework is that those frameworks are based on containers that have comparatively slow startup times, he added.

It remains to be seen how much traction Wasm gains in the months ahead, but Butcher said he expects most backend services, such as databases, will continue to be built using containers. Fermyon is betting, however, that many future cloud-native applications built by the average developer will be constructed using Wasm. In the longer term, Wasm will also soon be used to build applications infused with machine learning algorithms, said Butcher.

In the meantime, DevOps teams should get ready for more Wasm code to move through continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. The challenge, of course, is that code will need to be managed alongside all the other software artifacts moving through those pipelines, as well.

October 27, 2022
Cosmonic Previews Deployment Platform for Distributed Wasm Apps

Cosmonic has made available a preview of a platform for deploying applications built using the portable WebAssembly (Wasm) binary format that enables applications to be deployed on any platform.

Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said the company is providing early access to the Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform to enable developers to experiment with a new type of software artifact that will be used to build a new class of cloud-native applications.

The Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform is based on wasmCloud, an open source application runtime that hosts components written as Wasm modules that can then be loosely connected to build applications. Originally developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium for building browser applications, Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment.

That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries. It’s that lack of distinct boundaries that enables malware to flow so easily from one software module to another. The wasmCloud runtime, originally developed by Cosmonic, provides a platform for deploying distributed Wasm applications and is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Prior to Wasm, Randall noted, every format for building applications led to the creation of ‘walled gardens’ that resulted in developers being locked into a platform. Wasm is the first software artifact that enables applications to run on an platform, including Linux and Windows, without any modification required, said Randall.

It may be some time before Wasm becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are about to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. Just as importantly, those applications will run in a memory-safe sandbox that is more secure than what can be enabled in legacy IT platforms. In fact, as more organizations review the security of their software supply chains, they may decide to accelerate their embrace of Wasm to build more secure applications.

Naturally, the transition to Wasm will have major implications for DevOps teams, as it represents an opportunity to streamline deployment processes across multiple platforms. In effect, the total cost of application development and deployment would decline as processes spanning multiple platforms become more automated using platforms such as wasmCloud. Ultimately, much of the infrastructure complexity that developers need to navigate today would be eliminated, noted Randall.

It’s not clear just yet to what degree Wasm will drive a transition to another era of computing, but the potential to change almost every aspect of IT is on the horizon. Ultimately, the issue will be decided by how quickly developers are willing to embrace yet another software artifact for building and deploying applications. What is clear is that the number of platforms that will make it possible to experiment with Wasm are starting to multiply.

October 3, 2022
CloudNativeDay: WASM to Drive Next IT Epoch

WebAssembly (WASM) is poised to drive the next era of development of cloud-native applications that can truly run anywhere.

Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic, a provider of a platform for building and deploying WASM applications, told attendees at a virtual CloudNativeDay event that WASM will be at the core of a new IT epoch that will enable organizations to more quickly build highly portable applications that are not tied to any IT infrastructure platform and more secure.

WASM, at its core, is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) drove the development of WASM as part of an effort to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code. Wasm is now being extended beyond browsers and JavaScript to enable developers to create a set of universal binaries that could work on any platform without modification.

That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. One of the issues of that approach is that it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is now trying to advance the adoption of a Cosmonic’s WASM runtime that makes it possible to run WASM applications on any platform versus being constricted to building applications that can only run, for example, on Windows or Linux.

That level of portability will prove crucial as more organizations look to drive application deployments on a wide range of edge computing platforms, noted Randall.

It may be some time before WASM becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are finally starting to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. That’s not only critical in terms of overall application developer productivity, it has major implications in terms of streamlining the management of DevOps workflows as it becomes easier to both initially deploy applications and continuously update them.

In the meantime, as organizations continue to review their application development practices to better secure software supply chains, it’s become clearer that legacy approaches to building applications are fundamentally flawed. Rather than attempting to reengineer processes to encourage developers to better secure applications, it may be more effective to change the way applications are built. After all, considering all the processes required to secure legacy approaches to application development, it may be cheaper and easier to adopt a new app development method.

The challenge, of course, is, as always, taking that first initial step away from the inertia of legacy application development approaches.

August 10, 2022
Cosmonic Contributes WebAssembly Runtime to CNCF

Cosmonic today revealed it has donated its universal application runtime for building cloud-native applications using the WebAssembly (Wasm) development framework to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The Cosmonic wasmCloud runtime makes it possible to run applications built using WebAssembly on any platform. In comparison, applications built using containers are not as portable because IT teams can’t take a container application developed for Linux and run it on Windows. The container technologies for each operating system are implemented differently.

The CNCF will make wasmCloud available as a sandbox project and will invite other organizations to start making contributions as part of an effort to eventually put wasmCloud on par with other projects such as Kubernetes. There are already nearly 80 contributors to a wasmCloud runtime that was launched last November.

The CNCF is trying to advance other WebAssembly technologies including Krustlet, a tool for Kubernetes environments that listens for event streams from new pods so that the scheduler can then assign workloads.

However, the CNCF is now not the only organization looking to promote adoption of WebAssembly technologies. The Bytecode Alliance has launched WebAssembly (Wasm) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) initiatives as part of an effort to promote standards that would make it easier to run Wasm applications anywhere. Originally founded by Fastly, Intel, Mozilla and Microsoft, the Bytecode Alliance now also includes Arm, DFINITY Foundation, Embark Studios, Google, Shopify and University of California at San Diego.

At its core, Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. That approach might one day replace the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct security boundaries between them. As a result, it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application.

Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic, said even though Wasm, in effect, provides another type of virtualization for applications, IT teams should not view it as a set of technologies that will one day obviate the need for containers. Applications developed using Wasm will be layered on top of various container platforms, he said.

There is, for example, already a Wasm project that creates a server-side Wasm runtime that enables applications to be deployed on a secure container architecture that is more efficient than Docker containers.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) drove the development of Wasm as part of an effort to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code. Wasm is now being extended beyond browsers and JavaScript to enable developers to ultimately create a set of universal binaries that could work on any platform without modification.

It may be a while before the fruits of those labors are realized. However, it’s apparent the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are starting to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the reasons why one organization may choose one platform over another will have a lot less to do with what developers prefer.

August 25, 2021
Unintended Side Effects

August 3, 2020
How the Nuts and Bolts of the Internet Are Evolving to Change the Way You Code

2019 was a big year for internet infrastructure, programming languages and platform development. In the last 12 months, we saw things like new connectivity in the sky and the sea and greater security of those connections with the growth of TLS 1.3 and certificate transparency. But three trends in particular stood out as having some of the biggest impacts on developers as we head into 2020.

Rust Capabilities Boost Its Popularity

Rust continued to grow in popularity as it was voted Stack Overflow’s most beloved language for the fourth year in a row, due in large part to its unmatched ability to free developers from the choice between safety and performance in a programming language. Before Rust, developers had to decide between languages like C, which is fast, but has a high likelihood of security failures, or Haskell, which comes with more safety, but is noticeably less performant. Rust provides a level of safety guarantees developers haven’t been able to enjoy before, while still delivering on low-level, native performance. The learning curve is fairly steep, but the batteries-included features you’d expect from a modern language check the boxes developers need to deliver on priorities next year.

HTTP/2 Paves the Way for HTTP/3, Allowing Developers to Build Even More Performant Sites Without All the Hassle

Protocols that deliver and secure richer content saw progress in 2019, too, with HTTP/2 becoming the most common web protocol and a glimpse of the even greater benefits of HTTP/3 to come in 2020. HTTP/2 made developers’ lives easier by simplifying the hacks and workarounds they had to do to get performant sites working with HTTP/1.1 by addressing the complexity of lots of tiny objects within a page. By reducing page load times and improving responsiveness, HTTP/2 has paved a solid foundation for HTTP/3, which has the potential to become widely deployed in early 2020 as the new transport protocol, QUIC, nears completion. QUIC, a replacement for TCP, addresses the head-of-line blocking delays HTTP/2 exhibits for some p90 scenarios. Additionally, QUIC incorporates TLS 1.3, ensuring an easy upgrade to the most recent version of the internet’s standard security functionality.

WebAssembly Promises New Possibilities

Most excitingly, love for and support of WebAssembly (Wasm) by developers picked up steam in 2019 due to the recognition it has received for its secure, performant, cross-platform and cross-device runtime. A glimpse into Wasm’s future promises greater portability, as it allows developers to take the code they have written and run it on entirely different platforms, at scale. Wasm is a sea-change for the entire industry as programs will be able to work not just on different browsers—as we saw with the Google Earth launch on Wasm—but beyond the browser, across various devices and platforms. Think watches, TVs, cars and security systems that can be more securely connected—not to mention the functions-as-a-service speeding up the world on the edge. With the backing of the Bytecode Alliance, a newly formed collaboration between Mozilla, Fastly, Red Hat and Intel, Wasm becomes a prime foundation for more secure and portable software development in 2020.

With all the changes in 2019, 2020 stands to be another exciting year for developers, bringing even greater flexibility to their roles and career opportunities. Ongoing internet infrastructure improvements continue to empower our developer community and enable more secure and efficient programming and computing—all while improving the end-user experience.

— Tyler McMullen

January 6, 2020