Cosmonic today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference unveiled a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for building cloud-native applications using Web Assembly.
Based on the open source wasmCloud distributed computing environment now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Cosmonic PaaS gives developers access to a lightweight environment that makes it simpler to quickly build applications that can run anywhere.
Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said a PaaS enables developers to achieve that goal by making databases and other non-functional services available via an abstraction layer that eliminates the need for developers to provision these resources themselves.
Designed to be deployed on any cloud service or on-premises IT environment, the Cosmonic PaaS also enables developers to define their own laptops, cloud resources or entire data center by combing resources to create Constellations. Cosmonic also enables developers to build a Super Constellation by adding customer-hosted components to the services provided by Cosmonic.
Originally developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for building browser applications, Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. The wasmCloud project was created by Cosmonic to provide an open source application runtime that hosts components, written as Wasm modules, that can then be loosely connected to build applications. Cosmonic reports there are now more than 100 members of the wasmCloud community.
The Cosmonic PaaS extends the capabilities provided by wasmCloud so developers can now more easily build Wasm applications via an abstraction layer defined by Cosmonic. Those applications are also more secure than applications built using previous software artifacts because all Wasm code is executed in a stateless and reactive sandbox that prevents malware from moving from one software component to another.
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 about to crumble. Every earlier format for building applications locked developers into a specific platform. Wasm is the first software artifact that enables applications to run on any platform, including Linux and Windows, without any modification required.
Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. Just as importantly, those applications will run in a memory-safe sandbox that is more secure than what can be enabled in legacy IT platforms. In fact, as more organizations review the security of their software supply chains, they may decide to accelerate their embrace of Wasm to build more secure applications.
Obviously, Wasm has major implications for DevOps teams, and Randall said Cosmonic is working toward integrating its PaaS with multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.
It’s not clear how quickly Wasm will drive a transition to another era of computing, but the ramifications for how IT is managed in the next era of cloud-native computing could be profound. It remains to be seen how quickly developers are willing to embrace yet another software artifact for building and deploying applications. What is clear is that there are an increasing number of platforms that will make it possible to more easily embrace Wasm.
