text stringlengths 0 2.67k |
|---|
**Justin Garrison:** And speaking of everything old is new again... |
**Autumn Nash:** It always is, because good tech is simple... It's simple. And then you make it better, and accessible, and easier to use. You don't just invent the wheel over and over again. |
**Justin Garrison:** Old ideas and new execution. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** We're talking about WASM today. WebAssembly. We have Bailey and Taylor. |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm really becoming a fan of WASM. It wasn't really on my radar, and now I'm like "This is kind of cool..." |
**Justin Garrison:** The only times that used it and I've written WebAssembly it was great because it was invisible. And that is not the case for Docker and containers, where it's part of your deployment pipeline... And as I compile out a WASM binary and then stick it on a runtime, it's been great. It's just like "Oh, ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm trying to figure out how I get into Kubernetes, and I really want to play with TerraForm, so I'm like "Maybe WASM will be how I get into Kubernetes." I mean, I use Docker all the time. But you know what I mean? I don't know, y'all with Kubernetes, y'all just feel like -- I want to touch all the thi... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. I just this last week wrote a 10-year Kubernetes blog post, and going through my history of what I've done with Kubernetes... Because I've been working with or around Kubernetes for nine years now. And I'm like "I don't know 80% of the stuff." You don't touch everything in the stack. It's lik... |
**Autumn Nash:** It's really nice to talk to open source communities and open source practitioners that are thriving, because open source feels real dark right now... So t's nice to see the Postgres community and the WebAssembly community; they all seem like they're really making good progress and solving problems and ... |
**Justin Garrison:** So let's jump into the interview, and when we come back, we will talk about some more old technologies. |
**Break:** \[07:00\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Today on the show we have Bailey Hayes and Taylor Thomas. Bailey, you are the CTO of Cosmonic and a co-chair for the W3C WebAssembly System Interface Group. And Taylor, you are director of engineering at Cosmonic and the co-chair of the WASM Working Group for Kubernetes. Is that right? |
**Taylor Thomas:** Yes, that is correct. |
**Justin Garrison:** I got at least part of the title good, so this is great. This is a good start now. Bailey, we first met a couple years ago at KubeCon. I was wandering the KubeCon floor, and I was trying to figure out this WASM thing. Like what is WebAssembly... And I went to a couple booths, and it wasn't really e... |
**Bailey Hayes:** Yeah, I think at the time we were very much underway on developing the component model, and this next iteration of WASI.2, that was several years' effort, that we delivered on January 24th, is when I held the vote in the WASI subgroup. And so that was when we officially launched it. And that's a prett... |
We probably should describe what those are, since that's very tied to my role... But the short answer between when we talked before to now is that it's very real, y'all, and people are building on it. We have customers and real use cases and deployed into production, which feels great. |
**Autumn Nash:** If you've never heard of WebAssembly and let's say that you were a customer, what would be your use case to switch or to try to build something in WebAssembly? |
**Bailey Hayes:** Yeah. So I would say that most people that are coming to the party are large enterprises that have a fleet of microservices; they're feeling the pain of having to maintain those over time, they're feeling the pain from cost to even maintenance complexity... And they're looking for a solution that is n... |
So if you're a platform engineer, you feel this problem extremely acutely, that you want to update the client that everybody's using, because you want to update the database that everybody is using, or you want to update the messaging provider that everybody's using, like Kafka... And you just can't do it, because that... |
\[16:22\] And the way that it actually looks in the real world is it's a giant human-built chain to actually be able to make these changes. And by decoupling that and by working at a different level of abstraction, the developers focus on what they want to focus on, just writing their business logic, and then the platf... |
Of course, that scale goes all the way to the people who recognize that WebAssembly is the next abstraction, that is safer, smaller, faster than all the things that came before. But for enterprises, it's usually that bottom line that's the most important to them, which they're feeling. |
**Justin Garrison:** Does that abstraction limit what you can do with the tools? If I say I have Kafka over here, and something else that's another message bus... At some point, I have to go to the least common denominator. I can't use the power of Kafka, because I'm like "Oh, well now I have to treat it like a generic... |
**Bailey Hayes:** Yes, absolutely. And we have Taylor Thomas here, who's champion on a lot of the WASI Cloud interfaces... And that is very much their motto. I'll let Taylor give it. |
**Taylor Thomas:** Yeah. The WASI cloud interfaces are a set of these things, like you're talking about, where we have this idea of "Okay, we have a lowest common denominator." And part of the work that we do inside the WebAssembly Working Group, that's part of TAG Runtime in CNCF, is we help provide feedback for these... |
Now, what's really nice about these interfaces and the reason they're called components is because you can actually compose them together, and you can choose which interfaces you get to opt into. So one of the key benefits of WebAssembly is -- this isn't like the CORBA kind of old style of interface things where you're... |
And the goal we see for the future here is let's say you have a Kafka, like you'd mentioned, and you have a messaging, which is actually one of the interfaces I'm actively working on right now... You're going to have the basic messaging things that you need from that. But you might not support all the Kafka features, a... |
So you can have -- what we see in the future here, and we're already seeing this now, actually, is you have something like these base interfaces, and then you have a Kafka-specific interface. And so when you're making these decisions, you're very clearly opting into a specific library or database, rather than getting c... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[19:54\] So it adds the portability and ease of adoption for like "Hey, if I fit this model, I can now change out my cloud." That portability is really nice. But at some point, I probably need some specifics, depending on my application. And not every application does. But is this similar to somet... |
**Bailey Hayes:** Yes, absolutely. So WASI started as the WebAssembly Systems Interface, but really now it's very much the WebAssembly Standardized Interfaces. So we're going through and finding that common set, or really it's most often the case that there's already some standard API or interface that already exists. ... |
There was previous work on "Can we come up with WASI SQL-style interface, that can just use kind of a lingua franca of SQL and hope for the best?", bypassing strings and kind of just basically creating a SQL socket, is all we gave people... And that very much loses out on the promise and all the work that we did in the... |
So the answer is we are focused on WASI Cloud \[unintelligible 00:22:17.10\] stuff, which is the 80% case, we have some that are very, very optimized for a specific use case, at even a hardware level within WASI... And now there's this third case that wasmCloud enables; we call it "bring your own components", but essen... |
The place where we're seeing that a lot is for people who have their own maybe proprietary providers, that are a very specific data store that they're using, and a very specific way of perhaps doing things like pagination... They define a WIT interface for that, which is the WebAssembly Interface Types, the IDL... So t... |
**Justin Garrison:** What are the "bring your own components"? What is that written in? Is that more -- do I write WASM to get a component? How's that work? |
**Taylor Thomas:** \[23:46\] So it's actually really interesting. One of the things that's hard when people first encounter WebAssembly is they think it's something they have to learn. What you have to learn is actually the idea of interface-driven development, that WIT IDL that Bailey mentioned. But WebAssembly is jus... |
And so when you bring your own components and bring your own interfaces, what I want to make really clear here is everything that you do with these interfaces is entirely standards-compliant. If somebody else implements that same interface for you somewhere else, and you first created it in wasmCloud, it runs over ther... |
Some languages are better than others right now, but that support continues to get better and better for all the different languages out there... And then the providers are actually inside of the wasmCloud context can be native binaries, because there's some things that can't be done in WebAssembly yet, or need capabil... |
**Justin Garrison:** So I can write a provider in Bash. |
**Taylor Thomas:** You could, totally. |
**Bailey Hayes:** You could. I have seen it. |
**Justin Garrison:** Just making sure. This is always where I start, yeah. |
**Bailey Hayes:** But maybe don't. |
**Taylor Thomas:** It's wild. \[laughs\] |
**Autumn Nash:** So I've heard WASM be described a lot as something like Spring for Java... |
**Bailey Hayes:** I could see that. |
**Autumn Nash:** So is it kind of like a framework that helps Kubernetes or containers be more digestible and easier to use? How would you -- like, if you were not as experienced in the Kubernetes space, or containers, how would you explain that to someone who wanted to get into the space, but was looking for a way tha... |
**Bailey Hayes:** I would describe WASI as sort of the model layer of MVC, of what Spring Boot enables. It's sort of a little bit lower; it's one piece of that puzzle, not the completed piece. The implementations of it -- in the Bytecode Alliance Foundation, for example, I'm TSC director of the Bytecode Alliance Founda... |
Inside the WebAssembly runtime we have some host built-in pieces that we call essentially providers, that provides an implementation of some of those WASI interfaces, like WASI HTTP. So how do I make an HTTP request? How do I respond to a request? So both the client and server side of it. Then there are entire ecosyste... |
\[28:04\] We embed Wasmtime into our wasmCloud host. That is where we get a lot closer to that completed Spring Boot story, where with wasmCloud host you have the NVC side of this, where our WebAssembly components are triggered in an event-driven architecture, and when they are triggered, we launch them inside Wasmtime... |
We're also able to streaming compile components, so it's really wonderful just for distributed use cases. And they're significantly smaller. So my case at my old company, some of our Spring Boot microservices were eight gigabytes, whereas with WebAssembly components they're typically kilobytes. Some are megabytes, depe... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.