Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes as a Developer Bridge to WebAssembly

At KubeCon Amsterdam this week, WebAssembly vendor Cosmonic has announced Cosmonic Connect, a mechanism for connecting existing environments to Cosmonic’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes is the first of what Cosmonic plans to be a suite of connection options for developers to start using WebAssembly (Wasm) alongside their existing systems. Cosmonic hopes that this will encourage developers to try out the open beta of the Cosmonic PaaS and learn more about how Wasm works and what might be possible with it.

“We give [customers] an easy way to connect back in with the stuff they’re already running in Kubernetes. They can try their one little thing or their side project or their experiment in Cosmonic without any extra effort,” said Taylor Thomas, Director of Engineering at Cosmonic.

The idea is that customers with existing applications running in Kubernetes can use Cosmonic Connect to take advantage of the resource efficiencies and speed of Wasm for specific use-cases without giving up what they already have. Data processing at the edge is one workload Cosmonic believes is well suited to Wasm. Customers are also moving to what Thomas calls hyper-hybrid environments where disparate collections of traditional datacenter, cloud, edge, and other environments all work together. He sees the portability and compatibility of Wasm playing an important part in making these hyper-hybrid environments work well.

Underpinning this portable compatibility is the Wasm component model, a part of the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). Wasm components are interchangeable, so a component written in one language (such as Python) can interoperate with a component written in other language entirely (say, Rust). Changing to a component written in a different language doesn’t require changes to the application, which makes maintaining applications and infrastructure much easier, particularly at scale.

“I believe the Wasm component model will completely change the way we write applications,” said Bailey Hayes, a Director of Engineering at Cosmonic and Bytecode Alliance Technical Standards Committee Director. “You just need one component to meet the need you have. Once there are a whole swathe of components to choose from, it will make it very easy for developers to get going.”

To help manage these new kinds of applications, Cosmonic has also announced Wadm, its WebAssembly Application Deployment Manager. Built on the Open Application Model, Wadm aims to provide a familiar experience to users of Kubernetes with its declarative approach to application definitions. Wadm is open source and part of the wasmCloud project that Cosmonic maintains under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Again, Cosmonic hopes that Wadm will encourage people used to dealing with Helm charts and the like to try out Wasm and Cosmonic’s PaaS.

While it’s still early for Wasm in the datacenter, there is already significant activity by a broad variety of early adopters. If Cosmonic’s approach is appealing to Kubernetes developers, it could be enough to build the critical mass needed for broader Wasm adoption. Wasm adoption could very well follow a similar path to that of Kubernetes itself.