 theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to Valencia, Spain and KubeCon, 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, 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, chair of CNCF, CloudNative Web Assembly 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 hallway con 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 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. Colin, 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 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 a cuff or 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 the next couple of years, the biggest conference of the year, just my personal opinion. I actually really strongly agree with you and I think that the reason for that is, 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 of vendors that oftentimes even have competing interests, 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. So WebAssembly, talk to me about what problem is WebAssembly solving that needs solving? You know, I think it's fitting that here in 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 you know we would not have been able to bring Photoshop to the web without Wasm. And just to be clear I had nothing to do with that effort so I don't 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 because it's running on the client's machines really low latency, high performance experiences in the browser, Wasm's really the only way to go. Well, so I'm getting hints of fruit, berry, Java. Yeah, absolutely, you know, the look, you know WebAssembly sounds similar to promise as you've heard before you know, write once, run anywhere. Of the differences 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 the 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 like 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 vine because there was no community around me. 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 WasmCloud that lets them flexibly scale machine learning models from their own edge in their own vehicles through to their developers 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 WasmCloud 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 WasmCloud 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 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++ and other coding. Talk to me about the ramp up. Oh well so yeah so C++ there was a lot of work done in scripting, Edidobi, taking our C++ code and bringing it into the browser. A lot of new instructions, SIMD that were brought to make a really powerful experience but what's new now is the server side aspect of things so that what just kind of what Liam was talking about now we can run the 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 like thin and like client back to my back end 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 to places that don't even traditionally have a concept of a processor. So inside the browser for example you know traditionally cloud native development on the back end has been dominated by things like Docker and Docker is a wonderful technology and containers are 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 a layer of equality from truly edge to edge. It can transcend different CPUs, different operating systems. So where containers have this lower bound of 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. 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 WIP stack that I want how does this work? Like how do I get started with? Well there's some great stuff that Liam already mentioned with Wasm Cloud and Fermion 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, tiny go really just a lot of places to get involved a lot of places to get started. Like at the highest level Fintan 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 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. You know 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 reusability 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 of 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? I'm thinking about performance, troubleshooting, ensuring clients have a great experience. What's day two operation like? It's a really good question. So there's, I know that each language kind of brings their own tool chain and we saw some great stuff on Wasm Day and people 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 non- for native code. So yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean right now it's still trying to figure out how the server side is 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 where we virtualized OS. The rise of Kubernetes and CNCF itself where we virtualized cloud APIs. I firmly believe that web assembly represents the next epic of tech. So I think that day two, web assembly 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. Kyle and Murphy, Liam Randall, I want to thank you for joining The Cube at KubeCon, cloud native con 2022. I've now have a JavaScript based app that I want to look at and maybe replatforming that to web assembly. There's a lot of good stuff there. We want to thank you for tuning in to our coverage of KubeCon, cloud native con. 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.