ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Hi, and welcome to "The Kubernetes Podcast from Google." I'm your host Abdel Sghiouar.

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Kaslin is on vacation this time. So we brought in a new voice, Mia Villasenor. Welcome to the show, Mia.

MIA VILLASENOR: Hi, thanks for having me.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Can you briefly introduce yourself.

MIA VILLASENOR: Yeah, so I'm a developer relations engineer at Google Cloud. I primarily focus on CI/CD and tooling. I'm also a huge Kubernetes fan. I'm one of those people that runs it in their home lab, so.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Cool, well, we're glad to have you here. For this episode, our awesome advocates went to WasmCon in Bellevue, Washington.

MIA VILLASENOR: We talked to people on the show floor to gather their impressions of the conference.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: But before, let's get to the news.

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MIA VILLASENOR: Ciliam is officially a graduated CNCF project. The tool, which started as a Container Network Interface, or CNI expanded over time to cover more use cases like mesh, multi-cluster support, security, observability, and more. Congratulations to the Cilium team on this major milestone.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: At the DockerCon event this year, Docker announced a new framework aiming at simplifying building AI apps. In partnership with Neo4j, LangChain, and Ollama. The JNI stack, as they call it, is designed to help developers building generative AI apps.

The stack includes pre-configured LLMs, or Large Language Models, Ollama Management, Neo4j as a default database and knowledge graph all orchestrated via LangChain.

MIA VILLASENOR: The Kubernetes community recently announced the 2023 Steering Committee election results. In total, four new members will be joining the existing continuing members on a two-year term. The steering committee is the community body that oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. The full list of names can be found in the show notes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: CRI-O announced they will be shipping their packages as part of the officially supported Kubernetes repository hosted on pkgs.k8s.io. The Kubernetes community recently made the switch from Google-hosted package repositories to community-hosted ones powered by the open build service. The new infrastructure will support CRI-O release 1.28.2 and higher, as well as all release branches newer than 1.28.

MIA VILLASENOR: The CNCF technical oversight committee voted recently to approve archiving the Service Mesh Interface project. SMI was created to provide a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes and a basic set of features for common use cases. It was accepted as a sandbox project in March 2020. In 2023, the SMI team announced they will collaborate with the gateway API under the Gamma Initiative. Please note that once a CNCF project is archived, it will not be supported anymore.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And that's the news.

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KASLIN FIELDS: I'm Kaslin Fields from "The Kubernetes Podcast from Google," and I'm here at WasmCon 2023 in Bellevue, Washington. This is the first iteration of this event, and I am here with--

DAN WILSON: Dan Wilson, CTO of Control Plane.

HOOD CHATHAM: I'm Hood Chatham. I am a maintainer of Pyodide which is a Python distribution for the browser end node.

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: Brendan Irvine-Broque, Product Manager at Cloudflare. I work on Cloudflare Workers.

JOSH BERKUS: Josh Berkus, I work for Red Hat in the Open Source Practice office, where I work on a variety of cloud native projects, including Kubernetes and a bunch of CNCF stuff and etcd and K-native and a few other things.

KEVIN JAIN: Kevin Jain. I'm a recent graduate from University of Georgia, go Dogs, and thank you for having me.

SID HUSSMANN: My name is Sid Hussmann. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Gapfruit.

DAWN PARZYCH: Dawn Parzych.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

INTERPRETER: I am Akasaka of Midokura's Advanced Development team, particularly when it comes to Wasm, I wanted to explore the truth of how Wasm could be introduced into our products.

RADU MATEI: Hi, my name is Radu. I'm the CTO of Fermion.

DAN MIHAI DUMITRIU: I'm Dan Demetriou. I'm the CTO of Midokura, which is a subsidiary of Sony Semiconductor Solutions. And we do IoT infrastructure for sensors built around the CMOS sensors that Sony Semiconductors makes. Sony is a leader in the CMOS sensor market, primarily for imaging like cameras and smartphones. And the new business unit that we're part of is aiming to use the same types of sensors for sensing rather than imaging.

RALPH SQUILLACE: Ralph Squillace. I'm a Principal Product Manager at Azure Core Upstream. I specialize in cloud native infrastructure, both for the open-source world and also for services that Microsoft builds.

CHRIS MATTESON: Chris Matteson. I run Sales and Solutions Engineering at Fermion.

BROOKS TOWNSEND: Brooks Townsend from Cosmonic.

KASLIN FIELDS: What were you hoping to get out of WasmCon.

DAN WILSON: For me it was learning about the whole Wasm community. I have some very, very little prior experience looking at Wasm back with OPA. I think OPA was delivered as a Wasm module, and that kind of piqued my interest in it. But I haven't seen anything-- I haven't had the time to really dig into this lately. For me it was just all about getting myself educated about what's happening, and it's been amazing so far learning.

KASLIN FIELDS: And by OPA, do you mean the Open Policy Agent?

DAN WILSON: That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

HOOD CHATHAM: I was hoping to meet a lot of these people who are involved in the Wasm standards process. Dan Goman. Meet some people from V8, from the browser maintainers, and just get an idea of who's making a lot of these things that I interact with.

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: So I really wanted to meet the community here. There's so many standards that are moving at an incredible pace with Wasm, and so we just wanted to meet people and see what they wanted out of our platform, what we should support, and how do we make some of these standards adopted by many platforms so their standards for developers, they can really depend on library authors to trust that they'll be there.

JOSH BERKUS: I was hoping to evaluate what the current status of Wasm was as a technology from a maturity status, from an adoption status.

KEVIN JAIN: So WebAssembly, it's a very new technology that I just got introduced to. And one of the key things that I was interested in was learning about how WebAssembly is going to play a role in development of serverless applications in the future. One of the key aspects of the thesis that I just like defended last month was delving in that region of the domain of serverless applications. So I was just interested to see where the community is headed, and I guess this is the best place to be for that.

SID HUSSMANN: Maybe I have to tell you a little bit what we do. So we're building a new operating system. We've been doing that for the last five years. So the new operating system is called Gapfruit OS. It's a microkernel operating system with capability based security. So it's literally the promise of Wasc being capability based. We take that philosophy all the way down to the hardware. So its capabilities all the way down, so every driver is isolated and so, yeah, we control the whole system.

So I really see a future of WebAssembly to declutter the whole legacy stuff that we have built upon from the last, I don't know, century, almost. And that is very much in line with our philosophy of how we build our system. And I think the time for the systems community is very, very interesting. We have folks from the WebAssembly or the cloud native community that really press down on how we build software in the future and how we can maintain those software.

But there is also a very interesting, from a systems perspective, the whole strong digital identity topic with TPMs and the trusted computing group, and how we bind that to, let's say, that zero trust philosophy with public key infrastructures and stuff like that. And on the other hand, there is projects like the SEL4 community and GNode where they push the security from the bottom up. So we have different momentums, and I see a future where these all collide. That's kind of what we are doing at Gapfruit.

KASLIN FIELDS: So you're interested in the standardization potential for Wasm as a way to organize and standardize how we do things?

SID HUSSMANN: That, and I'm not really from an application developer, but from the systems perspective, if everyone is doing containers and containers are very specific to Linux. And we are trying to build a new operating system, we kind of have to deal with that fact and that huge API that Linux provides is tough to also provide. So we very much appreciate the WebAssembly approach of keeping those interfaces as clean and lean as possible. Yeah. So we see a way forward.

DAWN PARZYCH: I am with Cloudflare. I am the director of product marketing for the developer platform. This is one of our first forays back into sponsoring events. So trying to remember how to sponsor an event, what things go into having a good experience and giving the right level of information to people.

AUDIENCE: I really wanted to talk to people who are implementing WebAssembly and hear what are they doing, what are they learning, what are the use cases that they see for it.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: Of course, the first reason is that we wanted to promote Midukura's wedge project, which makes developing devices that use Wasm easier. But the second reason is I've been studying Wasm, and this seemed like a great chance to talk with famous people in the Wasm space. So I was very excited for that.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

RADU MATEI: I think the biggest thing that I was looking forward to is getting to hang out again with people that we've known for five, six years in the community and getting a chance to just catch up and talk to everyone. That's been, like, the highlight of my conference so far.

DAN MIHAI DUMITRIU: So first of all, I haven't been to any Wasm events before this one, and I just wanted to meet some of my peers in the industry. Also I work from home, so it's great to get out of the house sometimes and talk to people face to face. I was just hoping to learn about the state of the ecosystem, who's working on what, and to discuss our problems. Also to showcase our early stage work and get feedback.

RALPH SQUILLACE: Well, first and foremost, I wanted to support the ecosystem and the community that is growing here. That actually is the top order bit, because there's so many great people trying to learn to do new things, and also find other people doing great things. It's really hard in an early area to find new tools that people are building. You just didn't know about them, so discovery is also the critical thing that I'm here for.

CHRIS MATTESON: So this is my first WasmCon. I've been at this company for about eight months now. I'm really excited to see the Wasm specific conferences versus the more general conferences like KubeCon that we've been to and see the people that are really making this whole ecosystem happen and understand where they see us versus other solutions here and what they're excited about. It's a different perspective than I've seen before, and I would love to see that and then have an opportunity to connect with people that I've only seen on Zoom and now I can see them in real life.

BROOKS TOWNSEND: You know, there's been a huge effort on Cosmonic side and underlying the CNCF Wasm Cloud project to support WebAssembly components with the upcoming release of the developer preview, WASI preview 2. Wasm Cloud has been around since 2019. I've been working on the project since then.

And it's always been kind of our dream to use interfaces standard with WASI for what we do, which is distributed WebAssembly, and we've just made that a reality with a ton of huge work leading up to WasmCon. So I think what we're looking most forward to with this was just getting a chance to show that off, get really integrated with the community, and finally have the right answer, that we're running WebAssembly components and contributing to the standard.

KASLIN FIELDS: What big trends are you seeing at the event?

DAN WILSON: For me, the big trends are about architecture simplification and being able to take pieces of your code that perform a function and deliver them in the component model in ways that are easier to test, easier to deliver on any piece of hardware. Obviously there's a whole ton of players around this whole ecosystem and SaaS space, and all of the different pieces that make this whole ecosystem work that I've been learning about as well. Those are trends that I've been seeing. Overall, that whole architecture around the component model and seeing ways that people are using it and sharing what they've built with each other.

HOOD CHATHAM: So with these conferences, it seems like there's a lot of people who are doing server side WebAssembly. I've been much more interested in browsers and node, though I'm going to start working at Cloudflare soon doing also server side WebAssembly. But yeah, it seems like people are very excited about the potential. Also I guess the big thing that people are excited about is moving beyond C as the lingua franca of how do you glue things together if you want to dynamically link libraries together, not having to use C signatures, being able to use more featureful signatures in the future.

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: I think a big trend I'm seeing that I was excited about is just how effective WebAssembly can be for some of these IoT applications where people are used to the development life cycle of firmware applications, and they can move to an environment that is truly hardware agnostic. I come from a more of a web development background where we always have these other options. We have containerization and other tools and VMs and just hearing from people who are working on a totally different domain about their world.

JOSH BERKUS: I mean, number one, that Wasm is still very much in the exploration mode. Right? If you look at the whole chasm model that's very popular when talking about growing open source projects, Wasm is still in front of the chasm. And the big trends I'm seeing at this particular conference are there's a variety of different sort of runtimes for Wasm, but WASI, and, to a lesser degree, Wasm time seemed to be the most popular.

That might be just the selection of who's at this particular event, but at least at this event those are the two most popular ones. Which is kind of important because I feel like in the early stage, Wasm is at a stage where there actually are too many runtimes for them to all be well maintained and full featured.

KEVIN JAIN: From all the cool talks that I've attended so far, few things that come to my head is the development of WebAssembly in terms of generalizing the technology with the component model. Now this is a very fancy term. I did not know much about it, but overall, what it was trying to do is create these standards which people coming from all these different programming languages can together to and then try to develop these systems which are interoperable and open up this vast new sea of like possibilities of what can be developed with this thing in the future.

And along with that, there was this one talk about combining WebAssembly with running AI models on the browser, which was pretty cool, because in the talk then they ended up doing inferencing of pictures of dogs and pandas and trying to figure out what the inference model returns, but all of that was being run in the browser.

And the third thing that came to my-- I just attended that talk right now which was about running an SQLite database inside the browser, and then it was pretty cool to see how all these different people from different companies are trying to come together and try to use WebAssembly for their use cases but also like contribute to the core development of the direction in which this is headed. So it was pretty cool.

SID HUSSMANN: I'm not the application developer, but I really like the component model that resembles a little bit how we build our system, but it's more like, how do I structure different parts of an application with different programming languages, and how do we define clear interfaces and stuff like that. So that's very, very cool. I didn't know about that stuff before.

DAWN PARZYCH: I'm seeing a lot of people thinking, what do I do with Wasm? What can I do with Wasm? I don't know that I'd call that a trend, but I think there's lots of people just experimenting and seeing what's possible.

AUDIENCE: I think curiosity, which is a little bit on the nose for an event where people are here to learn, but given that WebAssembly is kind of on the cusp of more broader adoption, I think a lot of people are here just to kind of answer the same questions that I came here with. Like, what's it for? What should I do with it?

AYAKO AKASAKA: Hi. [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: Right now the trend of preview 2's component model. At first it seemed like a dream, but now I feel more that, in many places, many companies, development is advancing and the dream is really close to being a reality. Normal components tend to take an amazing amount of overhead, but with the new component model, it's possible to realize a variety of new ways of doing things.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: I've heard that a lot here.

INTERPRETER: Yeah. Everyone's like component, component, component, model.

RADU MATEI: I think that the thing that's coming across as really interesting, there are a lot of talks talking about artificial intelligence and running inferencing from WebAssembly, so I think that is the big trend that's happening at this conference so far.

DAN MIHAI DUMITRIU: I think one of the biggest things is the component model. Everybody's talking about that in Wasm, which is supposed to enable polyglot development, like using multiple languages, mix and matching languages in composed applications. And actually, I'm positively surprised about how many people were mentioning polyglot development. Maybe it's a bit of a fad. Some people care. Some people don't. But we do care, so I'm happy about that.

RALPH SQUILLACE: Pretty clear trend is the appreciation of what the component model will bring to WebAssembly and WASI generally. Obviously that's an evolving thing, but it's pretty clear that people are seeing the benefits that will appear and have already appeared. Also there's a degree of maturity for certain critical workloads, so it's clear that AI and ML are being invested in here.

And they actually can be run now, which is really cool, and a lot of integration with experiences and tools that we already know. So it's becoming less surprising to use it and stuff like that. It's really great. Those areas are really seeing big improvement.

CHRIS MATTESON: Some of the biggest things that I've seen is there's obviously increasing interest from companies beyond just the startups in the space. Right? So like we have got F5, NginX is here this time, and we've seen more and more. I've seen a lot of larger companies walking around, people that are saying, this is really something I can build real use cases on where it's not just a toy.

It's not just a front end thing. I've seen a lot of people seem to be really searching how they can go use this on the back end, how they can use this in production for not a startup, but a big company.

BROOKS TOWNSEND: You know, what I notice about so many different companies, researchers, projects, is that WebAssembly as an overall trend has been such a perfect use case for pushing compute as close to data as possible, whether that's getting close to a database, like running a user defined function right next to a database, running a filter close to an HTTP proxy rule, or even something that I try to talk about in my talk earlier today, which is pushing Wasm as close to the user as possible. That platform agnostic target is just perfect for just pushing the boundaries of where we can deploy compute today.

KASLIN FIELDS: What's your favorite thing you've learned so far?

DAN WILSON: So the thing I've learned- well, I've learned a ton, first of all. But the thing that I've been able to take away from this. So far is that you can run Wasm on Kubernetes. If you use ContainerD and there's Wasm time as a runtime, you can actually run Wasm pretty easily as a part of your existing Kubernetes clusters. You can even apparently run Wasm alongside other non-Wasm components, which makes it possible to use things like Envoy Proxy or other meshes to supplement your Wasm workloads and get them to fully integrate with all of your existing components in your system, which is hugely important.

HOOD CHATHAM: Well, so I got to ask Dan Goman about a lot of details about the history of how the WebAssembly instruction set came together and what models they were using from-- he gave a great talk talking about what things were good in Unix and what are mistakes that they don't want to repeat, like big balls of global state.

And so I learned a lot about what the process looked like for producing the WebAssembly standards, and so I've really enjoyed getting to hear about that.

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: I feel like my brain is probably just overwhelmed by all what is possible with WIT now and using that as an IDL and what it unlocks for being able to offer these standard set of APIs across many of the platforms that are here. I'm still unwinding all of that in my own brain and what we want to do.

KASLIN FIELDS: Can you give a little bit of a look at what WIT is?

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: Yeah. So WIT is a way of defining what APIs are available in a given host and having a-- kind of like a plugin architecture, and so so many people building WebAssembly applications, especially in environments that are web interoperable, are having to manually create their own bindings. We do this ourselves with the Workers RS project, which is our Rust bindings, and that's a lot of work to have to write that Gloo code for each language.

And so having WIT as this layer that defines, here's the APIs that are available, then you can generate those bindings for many different languages in a much more scalable and automated way. We have people all the time who come to us and they're really interested in, I want to build workers using Kotlin, or I want to build workers using Swift, and I want to be able to talk to all these other services, whether it's a Web API or a Cloudflare API.

Without those bindings, you can't do that. And so we're really excited about some of the standards here as ways to enable more languages, really beyond Rust, because there's so much Rust at this conference. Most of the demos are Rust, but there's a much bigger universe out there to touch.

JOSH BERKUS: My favorite thing I've learned so far is that there's a lot of talk about Wasm potentially replacing Kubernetes, potentially replacing Containers, et cetera. But the production use cases that we have today are all running on top of Kubernetes.

KEVIN JAIN: One of the most mind blowing thing or I would call my favorite thing that I've learned so far was the ability of WebAssembly to run games. And there was a demo done by Cloudflare where they ran Doom, the '90s game, into that browser, and I was playing it and I was like, oh, but it's running in the browser.

It was pretty cool to see that WebAssembly allows applications to-- code that has been written in the '90s to be run like this in browsers of today. I feel like I'm definitely sure there's going to be a company that might come up and be like, oh, we are going to provide you all the games that you've learned playing or you are familiarized with in the past, and then now we're going to provide all of that as a service. I don't know. Excited.

SID HUSSMANN: So I really enjoyed the talk of Kimberly. She works at BOSH. She does real time stuff. That was awesome. So, I mean, the potential-- that opens up a new whole potential from automotive to industrial automation and stuff like that. And I really also-- what I learned is that component model, how Wasm is dealing with that, with the interfaces that they're now working on with the component model.

DAWN PARZYCH: I've learned that if we put a game on our big monitor behind us, lots of people come to the booth to talk to us.

AUDIENCE: I really like hearing about how technologies get used in practice, and I've talked with multiple people who are like more on the end user side of it, talking about how WebAssembly has the potential to help them use older devices, older systems, older software without having to change it. And so I know there was a keynote from BOSH. There was somebody else who's in a medical field. So I think learning that it can help people keep their existing systems but modernize them and make them better, I think that's really interesting.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: From people discussing the component model, I learned about a concept in Python called dynamic linking, because this concept exists in Python, and I definitely think we should add support for Python. There seems to be a lot of people making AI models who won't use it unless it's Python. A lot of people seem to be able to use Python to more easily compose modules. I think this is amazing.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: Yeah, that does seem to be the case. Personally, I find Python to be really hard. But if I use Wasm, maybe that's OK.

INTERPRETER: Yeah. It's OK. If you compare it to C or C++, yeah.

RADU MATEI: There are way more industrial IoT use cases for WebAssembly than I thought previously, so it's actually getting to see and talk to some of the people who are doing the work to get WebAssembly to run there has been really cool.

DAN MIHAI DUMITRIU: So actually, first of all, one of the best things about this event is I think that the attendees here have a very high level of competence. You know? So I'm really happy about that. I mean, we can discuss things in a very meaningful way. That's great. And I'm happy about the relative maturity of the ecosystem so far. I think it's still very early, but people are using this in production.

I'm also glad that I've met some of our close peers in the industry, like BOSH and Siemens, that are also doing embedded systems like us, which is different from some of the other companies here like Fermion and Cosmonic, et cetera, that are really targeting cloud development bigger applications and such. So I'm glad that somebody else is doing embedded like we are.

RALPH SQUILLACE: People are actually thinking about writing WebAssembly kernels or actually doing WebAssembly kernels and thinking about WebAssembly OSes, hardware abstraction layer, stuff way down at the bottom that you would not normally think of in terms of WebAssembly. That was really surprising, and I think incredibly fun.

CHRIS MATTESON: Let's see. So we announced a new product, AI inferencing, on Tuesday, and so I've had an opportunity to quiz-- our CTO Radu is here as well, and that's helped me learn more about what we're doing, and then try to understand how we can improve the process. He's told me things that I didn't think that we were going to be able to get done in the near term that he's planning on getting done that will make it easier and faster for people to have an experience locally to the cloud. So selfishly, that was my favorite thing because it's improves our offering. I think it's making it much more exciting for some customers.

BROOKS TOWNSEND: My favorite thing-- and I've worked at a little bit of a higher level on the Cosmonic side for a little bit-- is just how robust the component ecosystem is. I attended the Componentized JS talk yesterday, the first day of the conference, with Guy Bedford, and I went in thinking that JavaScript components, for example, were really far. It was going to take a while for me to get to run JavaScript in Cosmonic.

And I actually think that tomorrow at the Byte Code Alliance Hackathon, I'm going to be able to make it happen. Learning how far the tooling has come with the people who are working so hard on the standards. I missed the talk today on Componentized Py, but I think that Python is in a similar space. It's just so exciting feeling that we're right there at the release, and people have been working hard at pushing the tooling there.

KASLIN FIELDS: What would you like to see at future WasmCon events?

DAN WILSON: More of everything. More people. More vendors. More talks. There's a lot happening in this space, and the number of topics is extremely broad because you're literally building out like this whole new way of doing compute. There's tremendous opportunity for people to re-architect. There's a huge need for more players in this space, more people, more vendors, everything. So yeah. That's what I would like to see just more of everything.

KASLIN FIELDS: More WasmCon.

DAN WILSON: Yeah, more WasmCon. Absolutely. Even though it's been a smaller conference with fewer people, there's just so much to learn.

HOOD CHATHAM: Well, I would really like to see more people trying to do stuff with browsers, because I really am motivated by the use cases of WebAssembly to allow people to do more with their computers, particularly in circumstances where they either do not know how to install software on their computer, or they are not allowed to for compliance reasons.

I think WebAssembly has humongous potential because everybody has Chrome on their computer. And so if you can deliver a website with a program, then that lets them do anything with their computer with very low friction. So I think this use case is personally way more motivating to me than all of this server stuff, and so I would like to see more people trying to do that.

BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE: I would love to see more people here who are building production applications in WebAssembly at the event. So we work with people who are, so I know that they're out there, but I think that right now we're still at this point where it's really driven by the people who are all building runtimes and platforms and things. There's some great hallway track conversations here, but I'd love to have the voice of people who depend on all these platforms every day present to be giving all of us that feedback, because we don't want us to get lost in that.

JOSH BERKUS: Number one, I'd like to see more users, more end users, application developers, that sort of thing. I was really hoping to actually spend more time talking to those folks and less of my time talking to vendors, but that's the state that we're in. That's about it, really.

I mean otherwise, for a vendor dominated program, they did a really good job of putting it together and the technical content is good and everything else. But I'd like to see more users and I would like to see more use cases that are either in production or are going into production on some kind of schedule. And obviously that's what the various Wasm community leaders would like to see as well, right?

KEVIN JAIN: Well, this was my first time attending this event, so a lot about what I knew about WebAssembly was pretty base level. But this got me so excited that I'm definitely going to be trying to come in the future of iterations of this event as well. But the key things that I would like to see is how the generalization efforts that I was just talking about before comes together.

It's pretty new now, and a lot of it is in the air where they have been trying to develop these things. But I want to see, if they come together, what kind of new applications spur from this. And already we've been seeing companies like Figma, Adobe, and then AutoCAD trying to port their applications from the native desktop experience onto the web, and we've been seeing great results so far. So I'm excited for the future, man, to see how all of this is happening.

SID HUSSMANN: Well, more people who do lower level system stuff. I would love to collaborate with those folks that have similar fields that we are working in. So that capabilities all the way down approach, like with Turtles All The Way Down, is something that I would love to see more in the future and maybe connect with those folks.

DAWN PARZYCH: I'd like to see how this grows. It's been nice that it's a small, very personal event. I'd like to see it get bigger. I'd like to see interest in Wasm expand and see more sponsors and more people here. But it's been a great time, great conversations, and I want more.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I think it's been surprising how many people I've met here who don't have a fundamental understanding of WebAssembly, and so I think that there could maybe be a little bit of one on one level content, like Wasm for Dummies, or Wasm for somebody in marketing who's new to it.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: We mostly deploy Wasm on devices, but devices, there's a lot you really can't do yet, I think. It feels like you should be able to run Wasm on Kubernetes in a whole lot of places, but really, I think devices are hard. Because of cases like, this device has a camera and that device doesn't. In those kind of cases, I would like Kubernetes to automatically adjust. Because of those unique characteristics, you can't just simply schedule across very different devices, I think.

AYAKO AKASAKA: [NON-ENGLISH]

INTERPRETER: That's interesting.

INTERPRETER: Yes. I would love to see it come to these kind of use cases.

INTERPRETER: I really like Kubernetes, so I think those kinds of use cases are really interesting.

INTERPRETER: Kubernetes still only really runs on big machines, but I would like to see it run in more tiny places. It would be really wonderful to see it appear on these kinds of devices.

RADU MATEI: I think a lot of more beginner friendly content would be helpful, both from the perspective of maintainers and contributors to the projects, but also users of various things that happen to use WebAssembly behind the scenes would be helpful in the future.

DAN MIHAI DUMITRIU: I think that it would be great to have more use cases, like real production use cases. I think that's still pretty early here this time. But I imagine that a year from now there'll be some pretty serious production use cases.

RALPH SQUILLACE: The thing here is that I think the potential for new crazy things at every layer of any stack is entirely possible. Oh, I didn't even think about that. There is a thing that I totally got surprised by with people running full server code in browsers and even hypervisors and browsers that were compiled on WebAssembly running as a web app, but hosting a hypervisor. I mean, nuts. I want to see all kinds of more stuff like that.

CHRIS MATTESON: So we had an opportunity to do a workshop the first day, but I always like the more interactive things. It's the little touches I see in conferences, like the lightning track hallway talk kind of stuff, and the walk up workshops and things like that that just make it more interactive and more accessible. I think those are always super cool to go on in addition with the overall agenda.

BROOKS TOWNSEND: So many WebAssembly conferences, the co-located events at KubeCon, Wasm Day, and then the small things like Wasm Summit, have been focused on the implementation of WebAssembly standards, all of the hard work to get the technology off the ground, so realize the dreams of the people really contributing hard to it.

I feel like now with WASI preview 2 coming, runtimes adopting it and starting to adopt some form of stability, language support is going to come rapidly around the corner. And I think we'll see many, many talks from end users and adopters who are using WebAssembly to accomplish really impressive things. I'm really looking forward to that.

KASLIN FIELDS: Thank you very much.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Well, that was a great set of interviews by Kaslin. I wish I could be at the conference. I know that you, Mia, have been there.

MIA VILLASENOR: Yeah, it was right in our backyard so it was definitely something we couldn't miss.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, it was in Seattle. How was it?

MIA VILLASENOR: It was great. I mean, it was cool to have this community getting together for their own conference for the first time. It's very much in its infancy. A lot of people were remarking that it seems like the early days of Docker. Everyone's very excited about this new technology and how it's going to be used in their business, so I had a great time. Cool.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So one thing I noticed-- and this is because we have covered Wasm, generally speaking as a technology, a couple of times. There was an episode with Phil Estes about ContainerD. There was one which we did with the CTO of Docker about Wasm and Docker when they announced the technical preview last year.

But one thing I noticed about WasmCon from the interviews, which is different than KubeCon, is the diverse interest in the technology from different people. So there was people saying embedded devices and IoT. There was people talking about the runtime and the sandbox and all the security stuff. There was people talking about the cloud stuff, so Cloudflare, edge workers, blah, blah, the Kubernetes things. Which is completely different than KubeCon, because KubeCon usually is about Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem. Right?

MIA VILLASENOR: Right.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So what's your impression from that? I guess what makes Wasm so diverse, generally speaking?

MIA VILLASENOR: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it comes from its origin story, right? Because originally it was something that was designed for the browser, and now it's something that people are like, hey, I could use this in Kubernetes. I can use this in my back end. I can use this in IoT. And so I think it's attracting people from all sorts of areas of the stack to see, how can I integrate this?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. There was also somebody talking about the browser part, and when I was listening to the interviews I was thinking, we should bring somebody who did WebAssembly back in the days in the browser to talk a little bit about the history. We did a couple of episodes on the podcast where we talk about history, and they seemed to be-- they hit very well with our audience, right?

MIA VILLASENOR: Right.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: So I feel like we should bring somebody who is not in cloud, somebody who have been doing on a browser and V8 and runtime and just, like, hey, tell us about Wasm or WebAssembly.

MIA VILLASENOR: Definitely. Yeah. And then looking at the way the industry is now, it's cool to see, like, oh, wow, it started as this, and now look what it's become.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. And even the interest in terms of some people are, oh, I care about the runtime, but then somebody was saying, well, I care about the standardization, all the WASI stuff. And it was quite interesting to see the different perspectives that people have. There was one question, and I hope you're going to be able to help me understand this or help our audience understand this. What is the component model?

MIA VILLASENOR: Yeah. So the component model, you can kind of think of it as like containers in the Docker world. A component is really just like a Wasm executable. So you can have a registry of components and then you can pull down those components and use them as needed. There's also Wasm modules, which are more akin to a shared library. And so there's basically different levels of artifacts that are used in this ecosystem.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Because somebody was mentioning the polyglot aspect, because one of the selling points of Wasm is being able to write in one of the 40 programming languages that support compiling toward Wasm, right?

MIA VILLASENOR: Right.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, so that was pretty interesting. Well, that was-- thank you very much for your time, first of all.

MIA VILLASENOR: Yeah. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. I hope that our audience will appreciate having new voices on the podcast, because me and Kaslin, we've been doing this for a year, so having a new voice is always nice.

MIA VILLASENOR: Yes.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And thank you for jumping on this last minute. I appreciate it.

MIA VILLASENOR: Yes, of course. Thanks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Thank you.

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