Cosmonic Commits to Next Iteration of Wasm Standard

Cosmonic today announced that its namesake platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for WebAssembly (Wasm) applications now supports the WebAssembly Component Model at the core of a forthcoming major update to the binary instruction format.

Through the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), the W3C WebAssembly Community Group that originally developed Wasm created a preview of the format’s next iteration in collaboration with the Bytecode Alliance, a non-profit consortium dedicated to defining Wasm standards.

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Dubbed WASI-Preview 2, this update provides developers a more modular and robust methodology for building applications and libraries using virtualization technologies by updating WebAssembly Core, WASI and other interfaces over the coming months.

Cosmonic CTO Bailey Hayes said the minimum viable product (MVP) edition of WASI-Preview 2, demonstrated today at the Wasmcon conference, makes it possible for Cosmonic to start building support for the new format into its PaaS environment today.

The Cosmonic PaaS is based on wasmCloud, an open source framework for running Wasm applications originally developed by Cosmonic using the Rust programming language that is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The Cosmonic PaaS also now provides application life cycle management via wasmCloud application deployment manager, a user interface to declaratively manage applications, a registry and support for custom names for HTTPS endpoints.

The wasmCloud foundation that Cosmonic PaaS is based on, including a Rust runtime, makes it possible to run applications written in multiple programming interfaces, including C, JavaScript and Python. That can be integrated using WebAssembly Interface Types (WIT) to provide an interface description language (IDL) alongside other components to implement deserialization, secure hashing and distributed compute logic.

It also provides access to a wasmCloud Application Delivery Manager (wadm) based on the Open Application Model to simplify deployments using YAML files or JSON code.

The overall goal is to make Wasm more accessible to a wider range of IT teams and developers. That’s achieved through a PaaS environment that helps break down the programming language silos that make application interoperability overly complex, noted Hayes. That goal is achieved in part by also making it simpler to swap one service for another, she added.

In fact, it will no longer matter what programming language was used to create any given component, noted Hayes.

It’s still early days as far as Wasm is concerned, but as the format becomes more widely used on server-based applications, the expectation is that the number of use cases will continue to expand. For example, Wasm provides 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 explains why developers are looking to embrace the format to improve overall application performance.

One way or another, more Wasm code will soon find its way into enterprise IT environments. The issue is how to manage those applications alongside everything else that has already been deployed.