An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
To understand what Cosmonic is up to, you first need to understand WebAssembly.
According to the WebAssembly web site, “WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.”
Clear as mud, right?
As best I understand it, Wasm is essentially a virtual CPU specification. It’s similar to hypervisors, which abstract low-level hardware interactions like network interfaces. It’s also similar to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which abstracts the underlying runtime context by translating Java into Java bytecode that will run anywhere.
Wasm takes Java’s ‘write once, run anywhere’ portability value proposition and brings it forward to the cloud-native era, supporting execution environments across hybrid IT landscapes by abstracting the specifics of any particular runtime or programming language.
In other words, the same Wasm application (written in any language) can run in a browser, on Kubernetes, or in a traditional VM environment, or even move from one to another as a matter of policy transparent to the user of the application.
Cosmonic is shepherding the open source Wasm project and offers wasmCloud, a cloud-based distributed Wasm platform. Over time, Cosmonic will add enterprise-class capabilities to wasmCloud in order to put together a commercial offering based on Wasm.
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