WebAssembly Technology Infiltrates Cloud Through Edge Computing

Advantages and disadvantages of WebAssembly

Proponents of Wasm claim that it is inherently more secure than traditional application runtimes, citing the fact that WebAssembly code is “sandboxed” or limited in the memory resources it can access, by default.

“One of the issues with software supply chain security is that I have an npm package with 100 dependencies, and I have no idea if those 100 dependencies are returning data to another server,” said Michael Yuan, CEO of Second State, a startup. which markets a commercial product based on the WasmEdge WebAssembly server-side project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “So with WebAssembly you can say, ‘This module does not have network access, although it is deployed on a network machine.'”

However, while WebAssembly sandboxing protects against some forms of attack, it remains open to others that have been effectively mitigated for other codebases.

It’s kind of like going back to how you built software 15 years ago – once the toolchain is running, it’s fine, but most people aren’t interested to go through all the hassle of setup.

“Sandboxed memory that makes it nearly impossible for WebAssembly to touch what’s out also makes it harder for the operating system to prevent bad things from happening inside,reads a Linux Foundation blog post from March 2021 (italics in original). ‘he should not touch, can not operate there.’

Another potential pitfall for Wasm/WASI is a relative lack of maturity among build tools and toolchains compared to the DevOps pipelines that IT pros have grown accustomed to over the past five years, according to Fintan Ryan. , analyst at Gartner.

“It doesn’t have the elegance of a lot of other environments,” Ryan said. “There’s a lot of work going on there, but it’s kind of like going back to how you built the software 15 years ago – once the toolchain is up and running. runtime is fine, but most people aren’t interested in going through all the hassle of setting this up.”

WebAssembly creeps on edges

Given the remaining hurdles to early adoption, Wasm has made its way into the corners of the tech industry with the strongest incentives to use it to improve scalability and peak performance.

For example, the rapid instantiation of applications using WebAssembly is attracting retail industry service providers, such as Shopify, which uses Wasm-based tools to host custom partner applications in its cloud. while maintaining the security and scalability of its core platform.

Over the past four years, CDN providers have also begun to support serverless edge computing mechanisms that allow customers to run resource-intensive applications close to consumers, without needing to access to or manage the underlying infrastructure.

These mechanisms, in turn, hosted WebAssembly functionality outside the realm of traditional web browsers. Cloudflare, for example, added support for WebAssembly to its Cloudflare Workers product in 2018. Cloudflare Workers was originally JavaScript-based, but WebAssembly was better suited to a wider range of programming languages ​​and tasks. more resource-intensive such as resizing images or processing audio streams. , according to a Cloudflare blog post. However, although Cloudflare Workers represent a new use for Wasm, they use the Service Worker JavaScript API rather than WASI.

Another CDN provider, Fastly, has adopted WASI within Lucet, the company’s implementation of a WebAssembly compiler and runtime, which Fastly donated to open source in early 2019. in mid-2020, Fastly shifted its focus from Lucet to Wasmtime, a more widely supported project. governed by the Bytecode Alliance.

This alliance was founded by Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat in late 2019 with the goal of improving Wasm security. The alliance also created WASI common, a reusable library of WASI functions, or hostcalls, to further standardize how Wasm projects use WASI.

Yet for most enterprise users in late 2021, WebAssembly seemed to be the domain of specialized service providers like Fastly, given its relative newness and complexity.

“WebAssembly is super interesting in terms of its relationship to the container space, because you wonder if sandboxing and WebAssembly-style runtimes are the future,” said Josh Koenig, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Pantheon. , a web operations company. platform in San Francisco.

Pantheon experimented with Fastly’s [email protected] platform, which includes WebAssembly, but hasn’t put it into production yet. Although Koenig has an academic interest in broader discussions of WebAssembly, he is unlikely to delve into WebAssembly in his environment, he said.

“That’s a level below where we’re likely to be involved as a company,” Koenig said. “But we expect our vendors to probably run WebAssembly on our behalf.”

Some WebAssembly proponents have ambitions for the technology that go far beyond the edge, deep into enterprise and cloud data centers alongside containers and Kubernetes. Learn how the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is cultivating WebAssembly server-side tools for enterprises in part two of this story.

Beth Pariseau, Senior Writer at TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @PariseauTT.