A survey of 93 developers conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found more than a quarter (28%) are using WebAssembly (Wasm) in their cloud-native development projects, with another 36% planning to do so during the next six to 12 months.
The survey, published this week, is effectively a straw poll that found 42% of respondents are developing or plan to develop server-side applications using Wasm, while 48% are combining or planning to combine server-side workloads with client-side applications.
Originally developed five years ago by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code, Wasm is now starting to be used to rapidly build lighter-weight applications that can be deployed on any server platform. The promise of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere is finally being realized some 25 years after the initial introduction of the Java programming language.
The survey found 70% of respondents viewed Wasm runtimes as a disruptive emerging technology. The primary programming languages used in association with Wasm are Rust (59%), Go (47%) and JavaScript (46%), the survey found.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) said they are both porting new applications using Wasm and migrating existing workloads, compared to 37% who said they were creating new applications only. The primary reason cited for migrating workloads to Wasm was application portability (78%), better security (77%) and improved runtime performance (70%).
Security ranks high because existing approaches to building applications rely on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. As a result, it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application. Wasm code runs in a sandboxed environment that isolates execution environments in a way that eliminates the ability of malware to laterally move across an application environment.
Target platforms for Wasm applications include serverless computing frameworks (63%), edge platforms (54%) and the web (52%), the survey found.
The biggest barriers to adoption were tools (46%) and lack of standards (45%). Just over half (56%) of respondents said Wasm developer tools are missing features and are difficult to use. A full 81% said they would like to see vendors provide full-featured and stable Wasm tools and projects.
Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, a provider of a platform for building Wasm applications, said that while survey respondents most likely represented more advanced developers, it’s clear Wasm momentum is starting to build. Much like JavaScript before it, Wasm is about to jump from the client to server-side application environments, he noted.
Less clear is whether Wasm represents the next era of cloud-native computing or is simply another type of software artifact that will be employed to build applications alongside other artifacts such as containers.
Wasm isn’t necessarily going to replace existing approaches for building applications any time soon, but it does provide an alternative to serverless computing frameworks for developing lighter-weight applications that run faster. Existing serverless computing frameworks typically use containers that are much slower to start up than Wasm code running natively on a platform, which accounts for why developers are looking to embrace the format to improve overall application performance.
One way or another, more Wasm code will soon be finding its way into DevOps pipelines. The issue is determining how to incorporate it alongside all the other code moving through those pipelines.
