KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 | Bailey Hayes | Cosmonic & Matt Butcher

More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024

Bailey Hayes

CTO

Cosmonic

Matt Butcher

CEO

Fermyon

Info

Bailey Hayes | Cosmonic & Matt Butcher | Fermyon Technologies

Bailey Hayes

CTO Cosmonic

Matt Butcher

CEO Fermyon

>> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts, Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland and Rob Strechay as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud-native computing. Coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF and its ecosystem partners. TheCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now.

>> Good afternoon Cloud Native community and welcome back to KubeCon here in absolutely fabulous Paris. My name is Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by analyst, Rob... Oh, my God, I'm with Dustin.

>> Rob?

>> Geez. It's because Rob's been there next to

>> me the whole time.All right. Get me out of here. Where's Rob?

>> No, I'm going to have start that over guys, anyway. I'm even more delighted that it's Dustin.

>> Okay. Good.

>> How about that?

>> That's what I wanted to hear.Good cover.Yeah. I'm good, I'm good. I'm good.

>> You spoke today. How's your morning been?

>> It's good. It's been busy. Yeah.

>> You've been grooving.

>> Yeah, back and forth, back and forth. I got a hard stop here in 20 minutes, so...

>> All right, well I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the heads-up, bro. Love it. More importantly, we have a fantastic guest with us. We have Matt, who's been on the show multiple times and we've also got the fabulous Bailey joining us. Very excited to have our first Wasm conversation of the show. Before we get into it, how's it going for you? You having fun, Bailey? You've got a big smile.I'm

>> having a blast. Having a blast. Lots and lots of Wasm happening all across the floor. I love to see it.

>> I like thinking about that of just Wasm spread across the floor right now.

>> It looks like blue carpet. It's actually

>> Wasm.Actually Wasm. How about for you, Matt?

>> Oh, this has been fantastic. The energy level here is just so good right now. So good. And you cannot complain about being in Paris. I was just like...

>> And if you do, get out.

>> Yeah, that's right. That's right. Off the blue carpet.

>> No Wasm blue carpet for you after that. You both had some big announcements. Bailey, I'm going to start with you. What did you announce this week?

>> We launched a wasmCloud 1.0, that's our CNCF project. We're pretty excited about that. We're also applied to incubating. I'm hoping that announcement will come out fairly soon, but that one hasn't come out yet. We hit all the criteria for incubating and graduated, so I'm feeling pretty confident about that one.

>> That's

>> great.And I would say, Matt and I both can talk about this one, which is WASI.2 has launched as of January 24th, and that is just for the greater community and that's just amazing to see.

>> It-

>> Love that, you can fist bump.

>> I am not allowed to jump, I'm told, but I'm allowed to fist bump. These standards that we work on together are just absolutely essential to get the right playing field out there for people to build production layer applications on top of. WASI 0.2, we don't even know what we're calling it right now. We'reWe're

>> innovating live here.That's right. Innovating live. Innovating on the fly. But it's so important to get those kinds of things out there with the community support. Fastly was in there, Microsoft, SUSE, dozens of companies in here working together to say we're building the right foundation, the blue carpet so that everybody else can kind of build their applications on top of it. That 0.2 release is a really big deal for a lot of us and we're very excited about it.

>> And so now you can take the exact same WebAssembly component, run on our platform, run on Fermion's platform and it's just ultimately portable because that's the power of standards.

>> All right. I want to ask about the-

>> Well stated.

>> I want to ask about the journey toward a Wasm platform, okay? Walk me from, I don't know how someone gets started with their, I don't know, first applications to maybe some of the biggest that you've seen in production today.

>> Wow. Okay, I'll take a swing and then we can go for it. So usually you just add dash, dash target. It is really that simple because WebAssembly is a high level compilation target that many languages support. So, if you're building in Rust, you say dash, dash target, Wasm-32-WASI, and you're going to outcome a WebAssembly module. So, that's part of the story. But with the WebAssembly component model, which we launched with WASI.2, that adds in another layer of metadata. So, it's another .Wasm type. And so to get that, there's a series of tools that we developed within the ByteCode Alliance Foundation. You use one of those tools, Componentize-Py that comes from Joel Dice working at Fermion, or you use the Go SDK that we have there. Build with that, and then out comes a component and it should be that easy. If it's not, please follow GitHub issues. We are an open community, open to contribution.

>> And it has been exciting to kind of see the momentum building. I mean we've talked here and there about WebAssembly and it's gone from its new and shiny and experimental phase into sort of the where are we going to apply this phase. And what we're seeing this year is really how it's getting used in production. So, in the keynote stage this morning, Michelle Donani from Fermion, Rouse Gulachi from Microsoft and Kai Walter from Zeiss, which is an optical lens manufacturer that does phenomenal amazing stuff. They showed the work, they've been doing, churning through tens of thousands of records using WebAssembly in a way that drives down the cost of running their Kubernetes cluster and drives the efficiency up through the roof. And that's right there, this excellent proof point that WebAssembly now has found the right application in this Kubernetes world to bring cost down and really start to tell this very compelling density story that allows people to do more with less.

>> So, is this an inflection moment for Wasm?

>> Absolutely.Absolutely.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the big takeaway for us. The tenor of the conversations that the booths are so different this year. I mean, it was not long ago that I spent all day answering the question, "Well, what is WebAssembly?" And now it's, somebody literally came up to me and said, "We are so excited. We've tried this, we know where it's going to work. Tell us how to get from point A to point B because we are in." And those are the level of conversations you really want to be having. And it shows the maturity of the ecosystem. Again, WASI preview 2 was a huge milestone for that, but it also really shows how bringing WebAssembly into the Kubernetes ecosystem during a time when there's a lot of downward cost pressure, when there's a lot of emphasis on more compute because of AI.,It's a perfect timing. It just feels like one of those moments where you're watching. You've been hoping that these two things would merge together, and here it just happened right before our eyes.

>> Hearing the user stories has been really amazing. At Wasm Day we had two different customer stories. Orange, which is a telco, so you're like, "Whoa, telcoms are here." And then we also had Machine Metrics, so automation on the industry factory floor. So, two really interesting use cases both using CNCF wasmCloud, and it's just you look around and you look at all these different projects that are out there, everybody's figuring out what their solution is to be Wasm-native.

>> It's such an exciting time and I'm just sitting here smiling because I remember when we met in Detroit, and it was so new. I felt like you were essentially defining Wasm on the show. Certainly upscaling me in that moment. And now to hear you say that people coming up and excited and not just a hypothetical thing, like the conversation around AI, it's still a lot of hypothetical stuff right now. The implementation isn't quite there and you're seeing people deploy at scale and-

>> In production

>> Yes. And probably-

>> We're there.

>> How does that make you feel when you hear those stories?

>> It blows me away because as Matt knows, it's been a little bit of a long time coming for developing the standard, right? Standards move slow and we've been working on it together collaboratively. It's very much an open community, open standard within the W-III-C. But getting it right is incredibly difficult because Wasm runs everywhere on every platform, every operating system, architecture, all of it. And the browser, not in the browser embedded even. And so trying to solve that wide design space is incredibly difficult, but we did it.

>> Exactly.

>> I want to dig into that a little bit, especially for the edge use cases. I mean, there's been a lot of talk this week about edge use cases and from what I know about WebAssembly, it's really well suited to many edge use cases.

>> Yeah. Really both near and far edge. But the really interesting ones are the edge cases where you're talking about running in a factory or running in the dashboard entertainment system of a car. And so you're getting environments like that where you can run the same code that you're running on far edge, CDN networks like Akamai, Azure Front Door, places like that, and the same ones that are running in the Kubernetes clusters that you're going to run into as kind of the de facto all around here. And it really is... Back when Java was first a thing, the whole idea behind Java was we can write this application once and we can run it anywhere. It turned out we need about 20 more years of refinement, research development and stuff like that. But WebAssembly is sort of the realization of those initial desires that were in the early Java community, which I admit I'm old enough to remember very, very well. And it's really exciting to see that happen before our eyes. I mean, we know it's been a lot of work, but it's work that we're seeing pay off. And when you watch that moment where somebody says, "Oh, I get it and this is going to be really helpful to us," oh, that's just awesome and we've experienced that I think time and time again, this particular KubeCon.

>> I love to hear that. And it's nice to see the evolution. I mean, you say it's a lot of work and it took time. For me in terms of our conversations, it's been in less than two years, which is pretty cool to see that level of adoption. Digging into the use cases a little bit because I think you just mentioned two fun ones. What are some of the applications, not just as professionals, but using your personal hat for this moment, what are some of the applications here of Wasm that really get you excited?

>> Wow, there are so many. I feel like while I've been here, people have been pitching their personal ideas, so I can't quite say all of them, but that's, like Matt said, we've transitioned, "From what is it?" To, "How do I use it?" And then now it's also turning into the like, "I have a use case, let's go." So, for just about everybody that talks to me on CNCF of wasmCloud in our project pavilion, it's all been like, "My home lab needs this. I need to build with this. This is how I'm going to host everything at home. I'm going to do home automation," and I love it. I'm like, yeah, open source it so that I can do it and maybe not spend my whole Saturday on it. Just the part that's really fun, which is making it run. So, I think that one I'm really into.

>> That's great.

>> And for me, a lot of the work with the AI world now, to set up a big giant fancy development environment in AI is actually prohibitively expensive and very, very difficult. But be able to do this in the WebAssembly world where you can do inferencing on my cheap PC if I'm willing to wait for it to do or push it up to powerful Nvidia GPUs. I have had a really good time putting together what started as demos and then gradually become more and more fun side projects. I've done everything from reminders to help me feed my dog to crossword puzzle helpers that don't solve the puzzle for me, but just set me on the right track. It's really fun when you try and get an LLM to lie to you and say, "Here are five cities that might fit in here. By the way, I'm obligated to tell you three, four and five don't actually fit." But there've been things like that that are just fun applications of these emerging technologies that can make use of WebAssembly's portability, its speed and it's sort of really just great compute technology that otherwise we'd be buying very expensive hardware to do.

>> I think that's one of the most exciting things for me about WebAssembly is that it actually can solve personal problems that developers really personally, itches they want to scratch. And that differs from a Kubernetes and everything here. Kubernetes, but there's no personal problem that a Kubernetes cluster has ever solved for on the weekend.

>> I'm trying to think of a counter example. I really am.

>> Right, but-

>> It's a great point....

>> my head is racing with the places where I could use WebAssembly.

>> It's really the flexibility of WebAssembly that I think is really giving it that take-off moment. And with the customers that we talked to in the telco space, they were doing it an experiment with Kubernetes on the edge and they kind of realized maybe this isn't the right fit, but wasmCloud and Wasm on the edge, that's the right thing for us. It gives us that flexibility to decide what's on-prem, what's not and how do we distribute to all these edges that maybe don't fit well with Kubernetes. And hey, if somebody creates a home lab and they want to run it at scale, they could do that too. Totally. That .Wasm can scale way, way, way up, as Matt was talking about with density.

>> That's cool.

>> So, what's next? You've had some big announcements this week. Give us a preview of the future.

>> Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of different projects build on 1.O. I think the thing that I'm most excited about, of course, is in the open-source and open-standard space. So, I'm so pumped about WASI Web GPU, I can't even tell you how excited I am to

>> be running-I can feel your excitement, so I got you.... GPU

>> workloads with WebAssembly. So, we're going to be seeing Wasm-native apps that run everywhere on every device with graphics, with interesting types of compute, taking advantage of GPUs in a Wasm-native way, which is just going to give us that ultimate portability and flexibility I was talking about before.

>> And we talked previously about the component model, which has been part of the Wasi preview II thing now. And this is a way to take multiple WebAssembly binaries and kind of glom them together and build applications out of this, which makes for really, really great composability story. And now that all of those specifications have landed, we're starting to see the launch of registries and things like that where you can store these applications. It's going to be, I really think that over the next 12 months we're going to see developers trying a brand new way of building applications by building conglomerations of these WebAssembly components. And that lights me up because you get everything from the crossword puzzle solver example to these massively scalable pipelines that are processing tons and tons of data on big Kubernetes clusters somewhere out in the cloud and just about everything in between and out on the edge, right?

>> Yeah, yeah. Everywhere. Wasm's going to be everywhere.

>> That's

>> right, that's right.Just like this lovely blue carpet. It's fantastic. All right, last question for you. You know I love to ask this question. When we have you back on the show, because this has obviously been invigorating and these 15 minutes have flown by. When we have you back on the show next, what do you hope you can say? And maybe it's Wasm is everywhere, so I'm going to challenge you to say something other than that. What do you hope you can say that you can't say today? I'm going to start with you, Matt.

>> Yeah. Prime up a good hard question and go straight to me. I actually know, we've got this vision of where WebAssembly is going to go and WebAssembly is empowering a new kind of distributed computing. And that's really where we're going over the long term is we really want to make it possible so that we don't even have to have that conversation, "Is it running in the cluster? Is it running on the edge? Is it running near far edge? Is it running on my watch?" We can just start to move WebAssembly modules all over the place and it's really the application orchestration layer that does that. So, that means development stays simple and the same kinds of applications can be built, but then compute gets a lot more intelligent as far as the way we move around these applications and execute them. We've made the first couple of steps toward that and Kubernetes played a big role in that. But I think what used to be so far out on the horizon, now we can see it and it's taking shape now and the next time we're here, I hope that's what we're talking about the whole time.

>> Love it. All right, well Salt Lake City, I hope that that's

>> what we get to-And the carpet will be purple.

>> Yeah.

>> Yes. I mean, I completely agree. I believe that the world, the way that we solve applications today, it has to be distributed, necessarily so. And there's no reason that Wasm isn't just that common universal piece of compute that you see running on trains, planes, phones, dishwashers, everything. Because Bosch also has talked about this. Literally, it's going to be on every device. Everybody's going to be walking around at KubeCon next year and they're all going to be running Wasm.

>> I love it. Well, we look forward to celebrating that, hopefully in Salt Lake and then again in London.

>> Yep.

>> Matt, Bailey, thank you both so much for being here. Seriously awesome panel and great to have the in-depth Wasm discussion. Dustin, I'm really glad you're here and it wasn't Rob.

>> Okay, good. Good.I'm

>> sorry about that earlier. This was a great chat. And thank all of you for tuning into our continuous coverage here on theCUBE from Paris, France at KubeCon CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech coverage.

Bailey Hayes | Cosmonic & Matt Butcher | Fermyon Technologies

>> Rob?

>> Geez. It's because Rob's been there next to

>> me the whole time.All right. Get me out of here. Where's Rob?

>> No, I'm going to have start that over guys, anyway. I'm even more delighted that it's Dustin.

>> Okay. Good.

>> How about that?

>> That's what I wanted to hear.Good cover.Yeah. I'm good, I'm good. I'm good.

>> You spoke today. How's your morning been?

>> It's good. It's been busy. Yeah.

>> You've been grooving.

>> Yeah, back and forth, back and forth. I got a hard stop here in 20 minutes, so...

>> having a blast. Having a blast. Lots and lots of Wasm happening all across the floor. I love to see it.

>> I like thinking about that of just Wasm spread across the floor right now.

>> It looks like blue carpet. It's actually

>> Wasm.Actually Wasm. How about for you, Matt?

>> Oh, this has been fantastic. The energy level here is just so good right now. So good. And you cannot complain about being in Paris. I was just like...

>> And if you do, get out.

>> Yeah, that's right. That's right. Off the blue carpet.

>> No Wasm blue carpet for you after that. You both had some big announcements. Bailey, I'm going to start with you. What did you announce this week?

>> That's

>> great.And I would say, Matt and I both can talk about this one, which is WASI.2 has launched as of January 24th, and that is just for the greater community and that's just amazing to see.

>> It-

>> Love that, you can fist bump.

>> And so now you can take the exact same WebAssembly component, run on our platform, run on Fermion's platform and it's just ultimately portable because that's the power of standards.

>> All right. I want to ask about the-

>> Well stated.

>> So, is this an inflection moment for Wasm?

>> Absolutely.Absolutely.

>> In production

>> Yes. And probably-

>> We're there.

>> How does that make you feel when you hear those stories?

>> Exactly.

>> That's great.

>> I'm trying to think of a counter example. I really am.

>> Right, but-

>> It's a great point....

>> my head is racing with the places where I could use WebAssembly.

>> That's cool.

>> So, what's next? You've had some big announcements this week. Give us a preview of the future.

>> be running-I can feel your excitement, so I got you.... GPU

>> Yeah, yeah. Everywhere. Wasm's going to be everywhere.

>> That's

>> Love it. All right, well Salt Lake City, I hope that that's

>> what we get to-And the carpet will be purple.

>> Yeah.

>> I love it. Well, we look forward to celebrating that, hopefully in Salt Lake and then again in London.

>> Yep.

>> Matt, Bailey, thank you both so much for being here. Seriously awesome panel and great to have the in-depth Wasm discussion. Dustin, I'm really glad you're here and it wasn't Rob.

>> Okay, good. Good.I'm