Session

Answering the call: taking WASM seriously

Steve Manuel - Dylibso

Steve Manuel, former staff systems engineer on the Cloudflare Workers team, is launching Dylibso to bring this exact level of maturity to the WASM ecosystem. At Cloudflare, I saw first-hand the kind of issues platforms encounter when running 3rd party code, how difficult it can be to debug, and why WASM (and running embedded, 3rd party code) is different from an operational standpoint.

So, what does it mean to have maturity in software and systems? I will talk about the end-to-end WASM software lifecycle, from writing and compiling code & debugging pre-production errors, all the way to deploying systems with WASM and observability of production systems. What to do when WASM in production fails? How do you debug issues in code you don’t have the source of? How can we prevent these kinds of common issues from even happening in the first place?

I will also talk about what it means to be a team of SREs, Ops, Engineers, etc. who are now tasked with maintenance of a system that has an embedded runtime or otherwise executes WASM code. This operational mode is more like being an “operating system” compared to an “application”, and how we all need to think like the teams at AWS/GCP/Azure whose services run our applications.

Dylibso is building the operational tools for teams taking WASM into production, and I will showcase a couple of these products which address CI, security, quality, and resource management. I will announce our founding team as well as funding, open source projects, along with what the future holds for taking WASM seriously and bringing a level of maturity to the ecosystem that we are all looking for.