WASM will replace containers
creston.blog
WASM will replace containers
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Re: WASM will replace containers
#2It would be so great if WASM gives us the paradise that Java promised thirty years ago. Being able to get fast, "write once, run anywhere" would be awesome.
I wonder if someone could make a decent cross-platform GUI toolkit to save us from the horribly slow Electron-hell we've carved out for ourselves.
Re: WASM will replace containers
#3We’re still using COBOL mainframes in 2025 in places so I’m sure whatever is the next trend in computing will be great, but I’m sure we’ll still be using k8s (and COBOL) in 2125.
Re: WASM will replace containers
#4[flagged]
Re: WASM will replace containers
#5Containers have two goals: reproducibility/portability, and encapsulation. WASM could replace the reproducibility but it can't replace the encapsulation.
> My money is on WebAssembly (WASM) to replace containers. It already has in some places. WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience. (Anywhere that can spin up a V8 engine, which is a lot of places these days.)
Luckily a container is a place that can spin up a V8 engine. If you want to bet on WASM my bet would be on containers running WASM.
Re: WASM will replace containers
#6[flagged]
> PlatformOps (formerly DevOps (formerly Ops)) team
Formerly sys admin
Re: WASM will replace containers
#7That would be cool.
It's been about 3 years since I dug into WASM and was bewildered about how to use it.
Is it time to dig back in?
Re: WASM will replace containers
#8What sort of tooling is required for wasm? Let's say I wanted to deploy a middle tier in our app, consisting of some nodejs code that talks to an external database.
We'd use a Dockerfile, install nodejs or use a source image to build from. How does that work for wasm? Does it have layers to reuse?
Re: WASM will replace containers
#9The article starts out "In the year 2030, no one will remember Kubernetes", but focuses mostly on containers. Kubernetes solves a lot of problems that a runtime alone doesn't, like rolling upgrades, load balancing, etc. etc. However, focusing on the thrust of the article, which is replacing containers with code compile to WASM running in v8, it's still hard to agree. For example, apps commonly need a bunch of dependencies, WASM doesn't solve that problem, so you still benefit from building images in multiple cacheable layers.
I mean I don't enjoy Docker either, but I think it's more that there are many problems k8s + Docker help you solve, and WASM alone wouldn't solve a lot of them.
Re: WASM will replace containers
#10[flagged]
Docker pre-kube was really great, imo.
Sticking a bunch of docker containers on a box behind a reverse proxy or load balancer felt like the sweet spot of complexity and scalability for most apps.