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.
