Cosmonic launches its PaaS WebAssembly in open beta

Cosmonic, the company behind the wasmCloud open source project, today announced that its WebAssembly (Wasm) Platform-as-a-Service offering is now in public beta. In this open beta, Cosmonic is also introducing a number of new features aimed at making it easier to integrate Wasm into existing applications, including Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes, which makes it much easier to integrate existing Kubernetes clusters and WebAssembly applications running in Cosmonic .

The company was co-founded by Liam Randall, who previously founded Critical Stack, one of the first Kubernetes companies, which was acquired by Capital One. He also worked on projects like Cloud Custodian, which Capital One later donated to CNCF, and later joined Stacklet, which aimed to commercialize Cloud Custodian.

“I’m more excited about WebAssembly and Cosmonic than I’ve ever been about anything. I really believe we’re going to be talking about the next era of computing today,” he told me.

However, like in the early days of Kubernetes, the Wasm community also continues to build the necessary ecosystem around the core technology to make it acceptable to large enterprises. It is possible to use Wasm in production, as big companies like Adobe and Cloudflare have shown, but the tooling is still very rudimentary. And for many teams, WebAssembly focuses on functions as a service (FaaS). It’s certainly an important use case, but the Cosmonic team wants to go beyond that.

“A lot of people are really moving towards FaaS. It’s all functions,” explained Taylor Thomas, director of Cosmonic Engineering. “And you know what, it’s a really good use case. in three to five years all FaaS platforms will be using WebAssembly because it’s just the easiest way to get all the language support in. But it’s a tiny slice of a much bigger picture And that’s where Cosmonic and wasmCloud really shine. We don’t lock you into a specific platform architecture. We don’t want you to have to say: you have to do it as FaaS. You can. use as a FaaS, it’s totally possible, but you can also build monoliths, you can build microservices, you can build event-driven architectures.”

The promise of WebAssembly, after all, is not that it allows users to build a better FaaS platform, but that developers will be able to write their code once and then run it anywhere – and that’s it. is what Cosmonic wants to focus on, in addition to the focus is on the WebAssembly component model, which allows developers to assemble different components of their applications and run that code anywhere, which Cosmonic puts also forward in its PaaS product.

“WebAssembly – and specifically the WebAssembly component model – is poised to be the final abstraction of technology,” Randall said. “It turns application libraries into building blocks and those building blocks are aligned with contracts for things like an abstraction for a global database or a key-value store or a message queue. And then under the hood, at runtime, you can attach them to completely different implementations, even in different languages, as long as the interface is the same This is the final abstraction that all technology has been looking for since 20 years.

Cosmonic’s PaaS is enabled by the wasmCloud application runtime, which Cosmonic donated to CNCF in 2021. Some of the more than 150 contributors to this project include Capital One, Volvo, BMW, and Intel.

Another open source project from Cosmonic is Wadm, a declarative application manager for wasmCloud applications. This takes a pattern that most developers are familiar with from the cloud-native infrastructure world and extends it to the WebAssembly space.

“We think of it as upgrading your car with the latest technology,” Thomas said. “Your car may be years old, but it still runs great and you really like driving it. But you also really like the idea of ​​push-button start and a hybrid engine. Wadm allows you to keep what you love about your infrastructure – familiar, easy to maintain, reliable, working forever – updated with the latest features.