DEVOPSdigest

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept wasmCloud as a CNCF incubating project.

wasmCloud, an open source project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), enables teams to build and run polyglot applications made up of reusable WebAssembly (Wasm) components. This allows applications to operate resiliently and efficiently across diverse environments—in the cloud, on Kubernetes, in data centers, or at the edge.

By using Wasm as the application artifact, wasmCloud decouples applications from underlying infrastructure, freeing developers to focus on feature development. It provides the tools to run Wasm components securely and efficiently and—instead of forcing thousands of developers to maintain the same libraries and capabilities in their applications—create a single set of reusable core applications.

The project was created by Liam Randall and Kevin Hoffman during their time at a top 10 US bank. The project is currently led by Cosmonic CTO and Bytecode Alliance Technical Steering Committee member Bailey Hayes. wasmCloud was designed to solve the friction that application teams face in every enterprise when writing software and it has grown in popularity since being accepted into the CNCF Sandbox; it is now being deployed and maintained by engineers working in a host of organizations including Adobe, Orange, MachineMetrics, TM Forum member CSPs, and Akamai.

Since joining the CNCF Sandbox, wasmCloud has matured and grown in popularity:

- Enterprise-readiness: Built around new standards, wasmCloud 1.0 was released in early 2024 as a stable, production-ready platform. The project has now reached release 1.4 and is full of DevEx improvements that bring parity to the Wasm developer experience.

- Standards-first: wasmCloud was one of the first to bring support for wasip2 and embrace the Wasm Component Model. This makes it the most open, secure, stable, and standards-led ecosystem for deploying and orchestrating distributed applications in production.

- Cloud Native and CNCF integration: wasmCloud integrates with a host of CNCF projects. wasmCloud is powered by NATS; it also integrates with 20+ cloud native tools including OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent, Argo, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Grafana, Azure blobstore and more. It is also possible to distribute artifacts using the Open Container Initiative (OCI).

- Industrial adoption: wasmCloud is deployed in a wide variety of sectors and use cases, from industrial IoT and automotive to digital services and banking, with more use cases emerging all the time.

- Community growth: In the last 12 months, the wasmCloud community has grown significantly. wasmCloud now has over 100 regular contributors, with overall contributions rising by 300% since 2021.

Main Components:

- Declarative WebAssembly Orchestration. The wasmCloud Application Deployment Manager (wadm) orchestrates the deployment and management of Wasm applications, at any scale or location.

- Seamless Distributed Networking. Powered by NATS, wasmCloud network has a flat topology that enables application components to communicate exactly the same, whether they are running on a single machine or globally distributed at scale.

- Distributed Support with wRPC. wRPC (WIT over Remote Procedure Call) is protocol agnostic and makes distributed computing in wasmCloud feel like composing components over the lattice.

- Polished DevEx. wash dev is a CLI tool that brings the hot reload experience developers expect.

- Support for Multiple Languages. wasmCloud abstracts away vendor and language considerations from software development.

- Completely OTEL Observable. wasmCloud has full OTEL support for traces, logs and metrics, the 3 pillars of observability.

- Secure By-Default. Having passed the OSTIF/Trail of Bits security audit, new features cement the commitment to security.

wasmCloud has several features and functionalities on the roadmap for Q4 and beyond including mult-tenancy, standards alignment, and deeper language support. Previous roadmaps can be viewed in the wasmCloud roadmap section in wasmCloud documentation.