Is Wasm the new Java? (Ship It! #106)

Changelog Master Feed

Danielle Lancashire is here to tell us how Fermyon cloud is built on top of nomad and EC2 and how they put it in a box with Kubernetes and WebAssembly.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. Neon separates storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Danielle Lancashire – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Justin Garrison – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Autumn Nash – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

WTA: What The Acronym

• ASM - Assembly
• WASM - WebAssembly. Came from asm.js from Mozilla
• AOT - ahead of time compilation
• JIT - just in time compilation
• WASI - WebAssembly system interface. Types: io, clocks, random, filesystem, sockets, cli, http
• WIT - WebAssembly Interface Type
• Wasmer - by wasmer company
• WAPM - WebAssembly Package Manager
• Wasmtime - Bytecode alliance (amazon, cisco, arm, docker, intel microsoft)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This is Ship It! (00:00:00)

2. The opener (00:00:51)

3. Sponsor: Neon (00:05:40)

https://neon.tech

4. Welcome Danielle Lancashire (00:09:26)

5. How is Wasm different? (00:09:59)

6. What is WASI? (00:13:29)

7. Limits of Wasm (00:16:07)

8. Danielle's responsibilities (00:16:51)

9. Why run Wasm binaries? (00:17:56)

10. Layers of security (00:19:45)

11. Fermyon process (00:22:53)

12. TOML manifest (00:24:14)

13. Runtime abstractions (00:26:02)

14. Postgres runs the world (00:26:19)

15. Multi-tenant routing (00:27:44)

16. EventBridge (00:28:12)

17. The best stuff is simple (00:28:23)

18. Running health checks (00:30:20)

19. The Kubernetes side (00:31:42)

20. Why put your cloud in a kubernetes box? (00:34:59)

21. Wasm vs Java (00:37:13)

22. Secure vs usability (00:40:24)

23. It depends (00:42:58)

24. Thanks for joining us! (00:49:22)

25. The closer (00:50:07)

26. WTA (00:50:41)

27. Outro (01:04:34)