 Hey everyone, welcome. This is a well, so it's day three of our coverage for the open source summit But we started a day early so it's actually day two officially of Linux foundations open source summit here in Austin And I'm really happy to be joined by two friends of mine. Well one one's a new friend one's an old friend It's not that he's old, but I know him a long time Let me first of all introduce you to my friend Liam Randall from Cosmonic Liam welcome. That's great to have you So great to be back on tech strong. I love coming on. It's always a great conversation I'm so excited about today. Absolutely. But this is the first time we're doing an in-person. That's right We've done a few virtual the last few years, but it's it's great to be back good to be back. Yeah Just real quickly before we jump into things we are in person. We were in person at RSA and You know, we had a lot of folks Unfortunately contract COVID I will tell you that I think overall the Linux foundations done a really nice job here I mean, we're not wearing masks right now, but I have masks in my pocket I'm sure the both of you do when you're walking here. You're wearing masks. They're checking temperatures. I mean look nothing's perfect But I was yeah, look, I think the Linux foundation truly embraces their mission of being community first Yeah, it's an open-source company. It's built on together And I think that I know that they work very closely with major stakeholders in their ecosystem to craft policies That put the safety and health of all the attendees first. Yep. So so kudos to them for that So we've got Liam Call I I'm blanking your list Murphy Colin Murphy and Colin is with Adobe Actually, why don't you introduce yourself? Go ahead Colin Murphy a senior software engineer at Adobe on the CC web team So some upcoming Creative products but before that I was in document cloud for a number of years Excellent and of course CC web is the creative cloud right in a web team. Yeah, I'm a customer but anyway The reason we have two folks here is I want to discuss something that's you know, we've seen it kind of Percolating here at open source summit this year Look, we are 15 years into the web shift and lift Some of its cloud native whatever But we are up, you know, just when we start getting our heads around that we're starting to see the The edge right the horizon as kind of the new frontier and it promises amazing things I had a discussion with Liam yesterday. We Recently did an event in Philadelphia of all places with a gentleman from horizon who runs their 5g commercial practice And he was all about the edge. Yeah, and it really opened my eyes to What a game changer this is Yeah, I mean the industry has really been driven forward by these enduring themes and technology of the last 20 years And if we think of them as layers of a cake, you know The first was virtualization and that started with VMware and paved the way for the first epic of cloud computing But especially with containerization. I love your term. We really were riding this great lift and shift into the cloud You know closing down data centers moving together Virtualized assets, but the next epic of computing I think is clearly defined by this great opportunity to bring our computing out towards the data Towards the edge and the users and there's a huge array of factors that are lining up In order to drive that story regulation limited deliberate autonomy a privacy performance the edges where the data is so we have all of these things strategically looking ahead and I think it's gonna be the theme that comes to dominate the next 10 years of computing absolutely So I'm a little older than you even before virtualization. I remember when we first got to you the TCP stack You know what I mean what a revelation that was my first project as a network engineer was migrating net buoy and IPX SPX the TCP I so you know I you know if you haven't you know routed more than one protocol in your life You know, I think you Absolutely those it was hard, but it wasn't that hard and when I as I look back on it anyway We're gonna trade config that system. No, no, no Yeah, I Remember those that I had zenith machine. Anyway, let's not even go down that fast because we'll be here all day But another important thing I just want to make sure our audience recognizes is when we talk about data on the edge and users Those users and that data is not necessarily generated from people There you know the IO I think one of the big things about the edges That's where these IOT devices are gonna live and to quote Carl Sagan right? There's billions and billions of them Absolutely, and that's gonna generate Mind-boggling amounts of data. It does generate mind-boggling amounts of data and where are we gonna? process that store it analyze it Work with it or yeah, exactly. So that's that's the big thing And I'm actually gonna be talking about a half an hour about this is one of the main use cases that would be that's that we're Looking forward to it Adobe is is co is around collaborative editing and machine learning at the edge And you don't need to send everything back to the data center because that's expensive, right? That's that's one of you know, we if you have if you're at scale Every you know every megabyte coming into your data center costs money it costs money and in the computer So if we can take advantage of edge where where network is cheap, right? And and low latency and then we can kind of send what we only worry What will we need back to the data center is the idea? Yeah, so I I think that is one of the Kind of trigger questions. We need to be able to figure out Which is what stays at the edge what goes back to the to the cloud and I'll give you something else I've spoken to some companies who do sort of like data analysis on the fly For for data there may be a thing where maybe you don't do we need to keep every? Bite of data whether it's on the edge in the cloud or on someone's machine, right? Right are we are we kind of wearing belts and suspenders by keeping the amounts of data? We have well, I think it looks like you know a set of you know band-pass filters or you know Seves that you're passing data through you know when you think about like your nest doorbell for example, you know, you're not streaming 100% of the video bandwidth back, you know on that device There's clearly some lightweight machine learning models that are doing initial detection of for example Maybe a face and then when you identify those trigger You know pieces of data that you filtered out those can get passed up to more advanced machine learning in the cloud To to build on Collins point. I think it's a looks like a pyramid You know, we have an incredible array of data here But we can only choose to pass and process so much across as we move up the stack And up the cost stack too as we as we think about that analogy probably holds pretty well absolutely so Collins spoke a little bit about the Adobe's interest in this Cosmonic well cosmetic was founded on on the you're trying to figure out a way to build software easier on this Enduring theme and a few years ago. I was a working at a large fi. I was a VP of innovation at Capital One and we looked across our technical portfolio and we saw an opportunity to really address How we build distributed software so we open sourced and started to build a real community Around what's now called wasm cloud and wasm cloud is in the cloud native computing foundation to an incredibly fast growing Open-source project whose users include Adobe BMW We've got huge contributions from Capital One to which telecom and a huge array of companies that transcend industry And as a framework what it does is it it takes this distributed edge And it gives you the ability to write software that can seamlessly move across it It transcends devices operating systems browsers CPUs But it gives the developer the opportunity to just work on their hard problem that matters their business logic BMW for example is using it to run machine learning models in their cars And what they love about it is it gives them the ability to pull those same models back into their Kubernetes or their clouds wasm cloud Operates Compatibly with all of those things nomad Kubernetes Etc. So Cosmonic is built on top of wasm cloud and is providing a platform as a service For that community of people that see this opportunity and are working to address it in their own organizations got it Just for you know, sometimes we talk and people are following this but there's there's no links at the bottom of our live coverage Wasm cloud where can they get more wasm cloud calm is has links to our community calendar today's actually wasm cloud Wednesday So we have our community call at one Eastern today We list all of our conferences there We've actually got links to live walk-throughs and labs at labs.cosmonic.com where you can get hands-on without installing any of this We also maintain a really active developer community at wasm cloud dev and as a part of the CNCF There's transparent community governance here So you can see who our contributors are you can see who's involved where Contributions are coming from and really understand the community and it's really a community that transcends our core team There's a less than 10 of us at Cosmonic today However, there's over 120 contributors to the core of wasm cloud So it's an idea that definitely transcends us and what we're doing. I got to get a little elementary with them for one second Again, we're on video. Can you spell wasm for them shirts? Just WASM It's a it's just short for web assembly is abbreviated as wasm And I think web assembly is maybe one of the next things we could probably talk about because Just kind of thrown out here. Yeah, and we're gonna dive into it, but I've got to give Tom a chance Go ahead. Oh, just talk start of starting off on web assembly. No, well, no, but you were gonna say something before I asked Liam to spell wasm. Oh, no, I was just gonna say, you know I don't even remember Happens to do that to people. No, it's fine me. I was all geared up for web assembly. Oh, we're ready to jump in the web assembly Well, I just want to Again, I don't want to put you on a spot with Adobe, but Adobe's a user wasm cloud Well, we're not not in production. We've we've we've definitely done some evaluations and we've and I've had a lot of meetings with Liam I mean, we've had, you know, it's been really productive I was just kind of kind of saying the nice thing is that we have we have the This web assembly is part of the W3 And then but then we have this this kind of if we once we talk about that we have to kind of talk about Wazzy and the bytecode alliance and wasm time and and that's where Liam's stuff is really That's what Liam stuff's really about and it's a it's a really fantastic community And so it's it's funny. You have to kind of peel back this onion to get to sounds like yeah We've got a couple more layers, but at the heart of it is this web assembly, right? That's right Yeah, exactly. Look the the industry has tried to address this right once run everywhere problem before and we've all heard of Java silver yeah flash and those were good ideas At at a at a conceptual level except they were driven by you know Dominate industry players and that meant that they weren't standards. They weren't they came as plugins and there was a sort of competitive element and Just as I think being at open source summit is a great way to talk about collaboration and Community and better together and when we think about the successes of linux and my sequel and wasm cloud and lots of great open source projects A web assembly was born in being a standard that everybody can build on and it originally came out of that skunk works That was metzilla, you know the creators of rust and they had this vision for Basically a simple CPU a little tiny virtual machine that you can put in anything and this little idea has grown into this Incredible community and is now supported across all major browsers all major chipset So it was another idea that may have been designed for the web but our belief is that the impact across the edge and servers and you know a server-side development will far exceed what you can do just inside the web because Now that we have a universal CPU that runs the same everywhere We have the ability to write software that can truly run anywhere and this is an open standard with participation by Organizations everywhere, so web is only the fourth language for the web And just to be clear, but I think back to your point web assembly is governed by w3 at this point Yeah, yeah, it's um, it's there's a governing body. That's called the bytecode alliance That's the sort of steward leader of the community. They Pulled together organizations such as Cosmonic Microsoft and lots of other orgs pulled together to sort of strategize however the standard just like HTML CSS and JavaScript is run by the w3c and that gives chrome and safari and Firefox and Edge the ability to have a common building point for building this and this is not, you know science fiction This is fact. This is here today This was proposed years ago and now we live in this world where Industry suddenly has a universal open source virtual machine. That's already running everywhere. Yeah I mean, it's really think of it like an OS. It's because it's we're starting right at the beginning, right? And in adobe's a big big big user of web assembly So all of our web based creative products and acrobat, you know photoshop that kind of stuff that that if you have that web experience that's using web assembly Got it. So It's all great Rubber meets the road and I want our audience to kind of Really wrap their head around this now. Well, you mentioned a bunch of organizations You know, they're the cause using with wisdom, but wasm. Yeah wasm. Excuse me, but Explain to the audience now where where does rub what what are the applications they're using with this where it really? Look, look, let's talk a wrap if you will Well, let's talk about web assembly in a couple different ways because first It's the technology that you don't need a strategy to adopt right because it's become so ubiquitous already For example, if you're using any of adobe's incredible products that they've moved to the edge for performance for security For ease of use you're already using web assembly if you're using things like Google Earth Or if you're using design tools like figma All of those amazing experiences are built on this and web assembly is even being embedded into other software platforms Yeah, so a big example Amazon Prime video, right that day there was a great blog post And that's why Amazon is actually part of the bytecode Alliance I believe one of the reasons they're part of it But when they update their apps on embedded, you know, it's really an embedded play, right? It's well, we're gonna we're gonna take our C++ code and we're gonna make a web assembly module And that's gonna be the the unit of it one of the units of deployment really really fascinating stuff Love it. And it's why it's such a big it's it's so hard to talk about web assembly from a from a you know Starting a ground zero because it's it's just it's so huge, right? It's such a yeah, the prime the prime article was fascinating because they talked about the challenge of supporting over 8,000 unique devices and CPU combinations, so think like your Samsung television your iPad You know all the whole plethora of diversity. I give you another company epics And I don't know if you're familiar with epics channel, whatever. It's a channel, but it's a streaming service It's a lot of things and I had this conversation with them They because they play on everything in anything actually some of it through Prime actually if you're if yeah Exactly if you're a company and you're looking at this edge today, you know You're saying wow, how do I support this incredible array of devices? How do I get as much reuse out of my code and web assembly becomes this sort of standard deployment mechanism now? I think your question was as well if we have this new you know I think each age of computing has been defined by some market leading app or experience and your question was well What's the killer app for this this question? I'd actually maybe turn it around a little bit If you look at the breadth and diversity of who's adopting web assembly The killer app for the cloud was probably AWS It was a platform that you could use to build your own experiences And I think that the killer app of web assembly will be a platform that enables other Organizations to build their own dreams and visions, and that's what I hope we've done with wasm cloud or open source Right, you know we launched this all right now. We're at the core of the onion. Yeah, and come on You know now we got it see all we Know it's all good when we started this vision We saw an opportunity with with web assembly and our market leading position Comes from the fact that we had incredible management that saw the value and the necessity For something that's going to be that transcendental and that important to be open source Because it needs shared governance it needs community and that was why as soon as we hit You know a dozen developers we put a wasm cloud into the CNCF and from there it has exploded to over 120 core contributors alone we have people like Intel and BMW Contributing TensorFlow and onyx Microsoft onyx, which is another machine learning framework Models to the community and that's something that when it's put in there folks like Adobe could pick it up and use it For example, and so to the question of what is our killer app for web assembly? I think it's going to be defined by the platforms that everyone uses to build their own experience And I think with a real difference between AWS, which was ultimately We're you know virtual machines right all the all the paths or all the infrastructure service it's now it's a real challenge and it's a challenge for these for the big vendors because It's what is it functions of service? Is it like lambda? Or is it like lambda at edge? Is it like is it like, you know ECS, right? Where they have where you kind of give them a container and they run it So it's like well, it's really all that right and in where it runs almost doesn't matter anymore And so it's very hard because they've set up these silos in these companies. Oh, you're the you're the edge people Right. Oh, you're the compute people. It's like well, it cuts across all of that So it's a real I think it's a real challenge moving forward for the big the big vendors Well, and I think there's two really important facts that your audience should learn when we when we think about that Calm, thank you. I think that was a very important the first is is that a lot of the silos that we build in today are walled gardens and a Lambda and lambda edge are incredible products and they're built by an awesome company with the team But it's a little garden. There's no doubt You can't take that you can't take that across that distributed edge or into your own fleet or your own devices So again, we're back to better together in community and the second opportunity here That is a little bit more nuanced is is that because now we're talking about shifting the cost of compute across that distributed edge This technology is going to open the market to entirely new business models when you no longer have to pay for compute You can have the compute spin-up in a user's browser and have them run the microservices There you suddenly enabled new peer-to-peer businesses or even new hub and spoke businesses that are you just Change the model change the whole different course model, right? I mean because one of the things that I think enabled cloud adoption wasn't just Yes, it was virtual machines. Yes, it was AWS that made it Kind of I don't want to say easy because God knows it's not but but that made it palatable for everyone to swallow, right? But also there was a course model as a matter of fact you look at the whole Fin ops thing that was here Monday, right? You see how big that was because this course model is spiral data control most people don't even have a handle on it Yeah, right. I think that is an indicator species that there's a problem Of course it is, you know when you have a whole cottage industry developing around If you're if you're in the the business of cloud today You were also in the business of you know grooming your cloud cost and managing your guard But that screams to me we need something better. We need a better mousetrap here exactly Well, and I think now docker is great and it's going to be around for a long time But it allowed that lift and shift like you started with it It allowed people to take things that were not made for docker not made for Kubernetes and just kind of throw it in a container Okay, we're done right and it's incredibly expensive and incredibly inefficient and not made for it But with WebAssembly you can't you you cannot do that it is it's it's its own OS, right? It's its own toolchain to compile into from all these languages and so it's almost it's it's a different kind of challenge And it's gonna we're gonna see who can do it and who can't it's gonna be really you know I may have a different Viewpoint on this thing you guys are a different opinion in my mind almost from the day IAAS infrastructure service came out. We were talking about its demise Everyone was saying this is a fine waypoint on the way to the real cloud, which is gonna be past Right platform is a service and we had Heroku and and some really good early You know tries it this sure I Think the fact of the matter is docker and containers became the past that our grandfather told us I will uncle told us about right that that became the de facto past Built on top of infrastructure as a service and it's great. It served us. I mean look there's a whole big industry around this and kubernetes and all that but With with the advent of the edge and and these other kind of places besides cloud It may very well be that this translates to that right you can have kubernetes on the edge and all of these things But it's it's it's kind of like we reshuffle in the deck a little bit, right? And let's see what comes out this time The deck's been reshuffled and and what I would observe if we take go up to the 50,000 foot view is is that with each epic of computing? We've had dominant vendors. Let's come back to the 90s and think about, you know Microsoft and Microsoft and and think about the early rise of the edge or the Virtualization with VMware of their dominance giving way to AWS the next epic of computing around containers and kubernetes opening the aperture to Microsoft Google and this broader set of and the other cloud Yeah, yeah, yeah, the broadest of clouds Around the world But this next epic of computing will also have Titans that rise and Titans the fall It always is and look people still run as 400s IBM still a thing, you know Those people will get to an epic and they will Keeps that stock price where it is. Yeah, look, they will eat they will get there But we will also see a rise of whole new companies whole new absolutely and here's something Yeah, right So I grew up in the wind tell You know empire, right? It was an evil empire to some not evil to others, but it was went out. Yeah, right? the advent of Virtualization if I would when we first started let's be honest, right? We're I don't know how old you are but him and I over an age when we first started talking about VMs it wasn't necessarily VM where there was some other Hypervisors that were really good. Yes, and they were open source hypervisors. Well, it wasn't even open. Yeah, right? But it became the dominant player at least, you know, a Lot of the public class didn't go VM where bite the phone right they went open but anyway VMware would not probably have been the the odds on favorite in the race for which hypervisor rules. Mm-hmm. Yeah Amazon web service probably wouldn't have been the odds on favorite for which public cloud becomes the 800 pound gorilla Bookstore of all things, right? A book store, right? Yeah Let it back Google. Yeah, I mean just but this is why I'm still doing this anyway I think as we look now at WebAssembly edge And you're right there are gonna be winners and losers There'll be some big winners if this thing really becomes the The new frontier the new place where we live. Yeah, you know in in the Metisphere, I guess it's the word now, right They're gonna be winners and as we sit here today. We can make bets, but if you know Companies are gonna arise Applications are gonna rise usages are gonna rise that maybe we haven't even really really thought about yet It may be with wasm cloud But man put it in some some person out here its hands. You're absolutely right and they come up with something that You know well game-changing look, you know, I I think that I love the analogy of a closed company like VMware Which is a phenomenal successful business absolutely and not independent again And Amazon which is built on open source and built on yes, it was you know, they have some awesome proprietary technology and The the reality is is the vast majority of the software that you Build or you buy is still mostly made up of open source and I think that those trends Will continue so I think that when we're looking for the seeds of the revolution We should start with the big open source players and the movements because that's gonna germinate now It may be picked up by some proprietary player and manifest itself as a pass that's closed But it's still gonna be built with together with the community So I'm gonna disagree with you with all due respect. Absolutely. I Think the open source train has left the station and to overtake that train You're gonna need some kind of hyper missile or something. I mean because there's so much momentum Yeah, I mean think of the same page then right? Yeah, I think we'll be open source. So so they're in No, I cut myself this morning, and I'm worried that I'm bleeding, but it's okay. I don't think it's getting picked up So anyway But I think that's I mean all the that so web is you know wasm cloud It's definitely the leader here. There's a lot of companies that have you know that are that entered the space every single one Of them first thing they do an open source project You have to today. It is the de facto business model. It builds better software, right? If you want and when we think about that this is diversity is our strength when you think about the reasons why open source builds better Software it's because you have more opinions more perspectives. It's tested against broader use cases. It's Transparent so, you know, everybody knows where the bodies are buried, you know You know where things are strong and where things are weak And it gives you the ability to collaborate and I think what's awesome about, you know, we're at a essentially a Linux foundation event here, which is a foundation machine that creates incredible properties such as the cloud native computing foundation With Oregon in part will open source with Transparent community and governance really is the accelerant that wins and you look at Kubernetes You look at Istio wasm cloud. You look at all of these projects. There is a broad theme there of collaboration I'm gonna tell you what else is important And this is me right so do right 30 years in this 30 plus years in the business. I Think one of the unspoken strengths of this model is the lack of salespeople And I look I'm a salesperson and you're always be closing too, but here's the thing I spent the first 15 or 20 years 25 years of my career Hiring salespeople. I paid them a lot of money. Yeah, and they work like hell to sell technology today, I Don't know if I would hire, you know quote-unquote salespeople if I'm selling Technology solutions. Yeah, because today and the whole the real power one of the real powers behind the open source revolution is Get the software into people's hands. Let them use it deliver delight show them. It works They'll buy it. Yeah, I don't need some Hocking you and also the nice thing is that what web assembly and the browser is already a big thing It's already an established thing what they say So they're just gonna say well, why can't I run this in the data center too? I made this great web assembly module. Why not now? Baked in and that is that is one of the important things, right? You don't have to mothball You're your data center, you know, it's part of this you want to call it a mess You want to call it a web? You want to go whatever you your infrastructure? Yeah, right? It it's kind of Borg like nope. No pun intended to our friends at Google and Borg and Kubernetes, but but it is kind, you know, we will assimilate you. Absolutely. Yeah Well, look, I think your your motion on the bottoms up go to market, you know developer to developer You know, let's just emulator and we're in our bombers here. There's three people that matter and software choices. It's developers developers developers, right? But that's the world today. It is it is and it's a persona that's building and Communicating software to themselves to other other developer personas and that's even the way that Colin and I met I mean, I had no idea that adobe was even using wasm cloud until we get this, you know Inbound email to hop on a hop on a call and you blew my mind in the first call with what you guys were doing internally It was incredible and the whole team was just like wow, that's awesome And we've had that that same experience with our community To talk about the strategic choices for us to start open to start building together with BMW You know as another example BMW just came to Kubekani you and they talked about how they're putting wasm cloud into their cars early in production and running machine learning models that can transcend Boundaries, you know that can run across their proprietary open stack or data centers or Kubernetes their cloud instances But also directly in the vehicles themselves, and that's a real power that continues to build better models there. I get it guys You're not good with over 30 minutes for our 15 minute interview But so I've got a wrap wrap up but in wrapping up I'd like to bring this up first of all wasm is WASM cloud and the website is wasm cloud calm Wasm cloud that's the main site and then cosmetic calm where you smell that for us We thought why be stuck in the clouds when you come to space, right? Okay? So a cosmetic is just like the cosmos COS Mon I see cosmonic calm. I love it adobe Yeah But we would love to hear more about what adobe is doing with web assembly that that is and you know, I'm gonna look We're here now, but We do tech strong TV three times a week guys Maybe we need a web assembly regular shop. Talk to you about this. Yeah, what's up? Anyway, we're gonna wrap up. I hope you enjoyed this extended interview Do check out cosmonic wasm cloud wasm cloud I think it could really if you you know in your career going forward you're gonna need to know that