>> Narrator: The cube presents,
the Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022
brought to you by Red Hat,
the cloud native computing foundation
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome to Valencia, Spain
in Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022.
I'm your host Keith Townsend.
It's been a amazing day,
three days of coverage
7,500 people,
170 sponsors,
a good mix of end user organizations,
vendors,
just people with open source at large.
I've loved the conversations.
We're not going to stop that coverage
just because this is the last session of the conference.
Colin Murphy, senior software engineer,
Adobe,
>> Adobe.
>> Oh, wow.
This is going to be fun.
And then Liam Randall,
the chair of CNCF
Cloud Native WebAssembly Day.
>> That's correct.
>> And CNCF & CEO of Cosmonic.
>> That's right.
>> All right.
First off, let's talk about the show.
How has this been different than other,
if at all of other Kubecons?
>> Well, first I think
we all have to do a tremendous round of applause,
not only for the vendors,
but the CNC staff and all the attendees for coming out.
And you have to say, Kubecon is back.
The online experiences have been awesome
but this was the first one,
where Hallwaycon was in full effect.
And you had the opportunity to sit down and meet with
so many intelligent and inspiring peers
and really have a chance to learn
about all the exciting innovations
that have happened over the last year.
>> Colin.
>> Yeah, it's been my most enjoyable Kubecon
I've ever been to.
And I've been to a bunch of them over the last few years.
Just the quality of people.
The problems that we're solving right now,
everywhere from this newer stuff
that we're talking about today with WebAssembly
but then all these big enterprises trying
to getting involved in Kubernetes
>> Calling to your point
about the problems that we're solving,
in many ways the pandemic has dramatically accelerated
the pace of innovation,
especially inside the CNCF,
which is by far the most critical repository
of open source projects
that enterprises, governments and individuals
rely on around the world,
in order to deliver new experiences
and to have coped and scaled out within the pandemic
over the last few years.
>> Yeah, I'm getting this feel, this vibe
of the overall show
that feels like we're on the cuff for something.
There's other shows throughout the year,
that's more vendor focused
that talk about cloud native.
But I think this is going to be the industry conference
where we're just getting together and talking about it
and it's going to probably be,
in the next couple of years,
the biggest conference of the year,
that's just my personal opinion.
>> I actually really strongly agree with you.
And I think that the reason for that is
the diversity that we get
from the open source focus of Kubecon
Kubecon has started where the industry really started
which was in shared community projects.
And I was the executive at Capital One
that led the donation of cloud custodian into the CNCF.
And I've started and put many projects here.
And one of the reasons that you do that
is so that you can build real scalable communities,
Vendors that oftentimes even have competing interest
but it gives us a place where we can truly collaborate
where we can set aside our personal agendas
and our company's agendas.
And we can focus on the problems at hand.
And how do we really raise the bar
for technology for everybody.
>> Now you two are representing a project that, you know
as we look at kind of,
how the web has evolved the past few decades,
there's standards,
there's things that we know that work,
there's things that we know that don't work
and we're beyond cloud native,
we're kind of resistant to change.
Funny enough.
>> That's right.
>> So WebAssembly, talk to me about
what problem is WebAssembly solving that need solving?
>> I think it's fitting that here on the last day of Kubecon,
we're starting with the newest standard for the web
and for background,
there's only four languages that make up
what we think of as the modern web.
There's JavaScript, there's HTML,
there's CSS,
and now there's a new idea that's WebAssembly.
And it's maybe not a new idea
but it's certainly a new standard,
that's got massive adoption and acceleration.
WebAssembly is best thought of
as almost like a portable little virtual machine.
And like a lot of great ideas like JavaScript,
it was originally designed to bring new experiences
to browsers everywhere.
And as organizations looked at the portability
and security value props that come from this
tiny little virtual machine,
it's made a wonderful addition to backend servers
and as a platform for portability
to bring solutions all the way out to the edge.
>> So what are some of the business cases for WebAssembly?
Like what problem,
what business problem are we solving?
>> So it, you know, we would not have been able to bring
Photoshop to the web without WASM.
>> Wow.
>> And just to be clear,
I had nothing to do with that effort.
So I want to make sure everybody understands,
but if you have a lot of
C++ or C code
and you want to bring that experience to the web browser
which is a great cost savings,
cause it's running on the client's machines,
really low latency, high performance experiences
in the browser,
WASM, really the only way to go.
>> So I'm getting hints of
fruit berry, Java.
>> Liam: Yeah, absolutely. >> Colin: Definitely.
>> You know, the look,
WebAssembly sounds similar to promises you've heard before,
right ones, run anywhere.
The difference is,
is that WebAssembly is not driven
by any one particular vendor.
So there's no one vendor that's trying to bring a plug in
to every single device.
WebAssembly was a recognition, much like Kubecon,
the point that we started with
around the diversity of thought ideas
and representation of shared interest,
of how do we have a platform that's polyglot?
Many people can bring languages to it,
and solutions that we can share
and then build from there.
And it is unlocking some of the most amazing
and innovative experiences,
both on the web backend servers
and all the way to the edge.
Because WebAssembly is a tiny little virtual machine
that runs everywhere.
Adobe's leadership is absolutely incredible with the things
that they're doing with WebAssembly.
They did this awesome blog post with the Google Chrome team
that talked about other performance improvements
that were brought into Chrome and other browsers,
in order to enable that kind of experience.
>> So I get the general concept of WebAssembly
and it's one of those things
that I have to ask the question,
and I appreciate that Adobe uses it
but without the community,
I mean, I've dedicated some of my team's resources
over the years to some really cool projects
and products that just died on the buying
cause there was no community around.
>> Yeah.
>> Who else uses WebAssembly?
>> Yeah, I think so.
We actually,
inside the CNCF now,
have an entire day devoted just to WebAssembly
and as the co-chair of the CNCF Cloud Native
WebAssembly Day,
we really focus on bringing those case studies
to the forefront.
So some of the more interesting talks that we had here
and at some of the precursor weekend conferences
were from BMW, for example,
they talked about how they were excited about
not only WebAssembly,
but a framework that they use on WebAssembly
called WASM cloud,
that lets them a flexibly scale machine learning models
from their own edge, in their own vehicles
through to their developer's workstations
and even take that data onto their regular cloud Kubernetes
and scale analysis and analytics.
They invested
and they just released a machine learning framework
for one of the many great WebAssembly projects
called WASM cloud,
which is a CNCF project,
a member project here in the CNCF.
>> So how does that fit in overall landscape?
>> So think of WebAssembly,
like you think of HTML.
It's a technology that gives you a lot of concept
and to accelerate your journey on those technologies,
people create frameworks.
For example, if you were going to write a UI,
you would not very likely start with an empty document
you'd start with a react or view.
And in a similar vein,
if you were going to start a new microservice
or backend application,
project for WebAssembly,
you might use WASM cloud
or you might use ATMO
or you might use a Spin.
Those are three different types of projects.
They all have their own different value props
and their own different opinions that they bring to them.
But the point is is that this is a quickly evolving space
and it's going to dramatically change
the type of experiences that we bring,
not only to web browsers
but to servers and edges everywhere.
>> So Colin, you mentioned C+ >> Colin: Yeah.
>> And other coding.
Well , talk to me about the ramp up.
>> Oh, well, so, yeah,
so, C++ there was a lot of work done in scripting, at Adobe.
Taking our C++ code
and bringing it into the browser.
A lot of new instructions, Cimdi,
that were brought to make a really powerful experience,
but what's new now is the server side aspect of things.
So, just what kind of, what Liam was talking about.
Now we can run this stuff in the data center.
It's not just for people's browsers anymore.
And then we can also bring it out to the edge too,
which is a new space that we can take advantage of
really almost only through WebAssembly and some JavaScript.
>> So wait, let me get this kind of under hook.
Before, if I wanted a rich experience,
I have to run a heavy VDI instance on the back end
so that I'm basically getting remote desktop calls
from a light thin client
back to my backend server,
that's heavy.
>> That is heavy.
>> WebAssembly is alternative to that?
>> Yes, absolutely.
Think of WebAssembly as a tiny little CPU
that is a shim,
that we can take the places
that don't even traditionally have a concept of a processor.
So inside the browser, for example,
traditionally cloud native development on the backend
has been dominated by things like Docker
and Docker is a wonderful technology
and Container is a wonderful technology
that really drove the last 10 years of cloud native
with the great lift and shift, if you will.
Take our existing applications,
package them up in this virtual desktop
and then deliver them.
But to deliver the next 10 years of experiences,
we need solutions that let us have portability first
and a security model that's portable
across the entire landscape.
So this isn't just browsers and servers on the back end,
WebAssembly creates an a layer of equality
from truly edge to edge.
It's can transcend different CPUs,
different operating systems.
So where containers have this lower bound off
you need to be running Linux
and you need to be in a place
where you're going to bring Kubernetes.
WebAssembly is so small and portable,
it transcends that lower bound.
It can go to places like iOS.
It can go to places like web browsers.
It can even go to teeny tiny CPUs
that don't even traditionally have
a full on operating systems inside them.
>> Colin: Right, places where you can't run Docker.
>> So as I think about that,
and I'm a developer and I'm running my back end
and I'm running whatever web stack that I want,
how does this work?
Like, how do I get started with it?
>> Well, there's some great stuff Liam already mentioned
with WASM cloud and Frmion Spin.
Microsoft is heavily involved now
on providing cloud products
that can take advantage of WebAssembly.
So we've got a lot of languages,
new languages coming in.net and Ruby,
Rust is a big one,
TinyGo,
really just a lot of places to get involved.
A lot of places to get started.
>> At the highest level Finton Ryan,
when he was at Gartner,
he's a really well known analyst.
He wrote something profound a few years ago.
He said, WebAssembly is the one technology,
You don't need a strategy to adopt.
>> Mm.
>> Because frankly you're already using it
because there's so many wonderful experiences and products
that are out there, like what Adobe's doing.
This virtual CPU is not just a platform to run
on cloud native
and to build applications towards the edge.
You can embed this virtual CPU inside of applications.
So cases where you would want to allow your users to
customize an application
or to extend functionality.
Give you an example,
Shopify is a big believer in WebAssembly
because while their platform covers,
two standard deviations
or 80% of the use cases,
they have a wonderful marketplace
of extensions that folks can use in order to customize
the checkout process or apply specialized discounts
or integrate into a partner ecosystem.
So when you think about the requirements
for those scenarios,
they line up to the same requirements
that we have in browsers and servers.
I want real security.
I want portability.
I want reuseability.
And ultimately I want to save money and go faster.
So organizations everywhere should take a few minutes
and do a heads up
and think about one,
where WebAssembly is already in their environment,
inside of places like Envoy and Istio,
some of the most popular projects
in the cloud native ecosystem, outside of Kubernetes.
And they should perhaps consider studying,
how WebAssembly can help them to transform the experiences
that they're delivering for their customers.
This may be the last day of Kubecon,
but this is certainly not the last time
we're going to be talking about WebAssembly,
I'll tell you that.
>> So, last question,
we've talked a lot about how to get started.
How about day two,
when I'm thinking about performance troubleshooting
and ensuring clients have a great experience
what's day two operation like?
>> That's a really good question.
So there's,
I know that each language
kind of brings their own tool chain and their,
and you know we saw some great stuff on, on WASM day.
You can look it up around the .net experience for debugging,
They really tried to make it as seamless
and the same as it was for native code.
So, yeah, I think that's a great question.
I mean, right now it's still trying to figure out
server side,
It's still,
as Liam said, a shifting landscape.
But we've got some great stuff out here already
>> You know, I'd make an even bigger call than that.
When I think about the last 20 years
as computing has evolved,
we've continued to move through these epics of tech
that were dominated by a key abstraction.
Think about the rise of virtualization with VMware
and the transition to the cloud.
The rise of containerization,
we virtualized to OS.
The rise of Kubernetes and CNCF itself,
where we virtualize cloud APIs.
I firmly believe that WebAssembly represents
the next epic of tech.
So I think that day two WebAssembly continues
to become one of the dominant themes,
not only across cloud native
but across the entire technical computing landscape.
And it represents a fundamentally gigantic opportunity
for organizations such as Adobe,
that are always market leading
and at the cutting edge of tech,
to bring new experiences to their customers
and for vendors to bring new platforms
and tools to companies
that want to execute on that opportunity.
>> Colin Murphy, Liam Randall,
I want to thank you
for joining the Cube
at Kubecon
Cloudnativecon 2022.
I'm now having a JavaScript based app
that I want to re-look at,
and maybe re-platforming that to WebAssembly.
It's some lot of good stuff there.
We want to thank you for tuning in to our coverage
of Kubecon
Cloudnativecon.
And we want to thank the organization for hosting us,
here from Valencia, Spain.
I'm Keith Townsend,
and you're watching the Cube,
the leader in high tech coverage.
(bright music)