 Hi, this is your host in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today We have with us Steve Mendel co-founder and CEO of dilipso. Steve is good to have you on the show Since it's the first time you're not talking in front of camera, I would love to know a bit about The the story of the company and also we will talk about you know How you are seeing the whole evolution of web assembly because we are talking a lot about that But let's start with you know the company Yeah, we're a very new startup launched the company officially in August of 2022 We are a still a small team for engineers working on bringing More maturity and better dev tools to the whole web assembly ecosystem and we're taking kind of an agnostic approach to Where are you running web assembly? It could be in a browser. It could be in the serverless environment could be an IoT device or embedded inside of another program We kind of see what we simply through this lens of a bunch of different users a bunch of different places Wasm can run and want to make sure that we're You're building tools that acknowledge those use cases across the board What don't you think web assembly is going to play in the modern cloud-centric word? Even you'll see a lot of tweets where somebody say hey web assembly is even going to replace Kubernetes and you know all those things so I want to understand the rule There by somebody is realistically playing in this word There's a bunch of different advantages that web assembly provides to you compared to you know a more Kubernetes centric workload like a container Mostly in the sense of the size of the unit of deployment web assembly binaries are you know an order of magnitude or more smaller in many cases than a container is And that allows you to pack more compute or functionality into the same amount of resources that you might use you know for Pod running containers in Kubernetes It's not always the right Architecture you have to make sure you're actually you know solving the job at hand But there is a really interesting future for web assembly in the cloud that brings costs down that brings operational simplicity and provides developers I think with a Better experience overall when it contrasts with a Complex system with Kubernetes if you don't need all the functionality that Kubernetes is providing you what kind of solutions are you offering? To the web assembly ecosystem. We started the company with an open source project called ecstism You can find our site ecstism org or on github at slash ecstism slash ecstism and ecstism is a project that provides a very simple path for developers a Number of different languages so you can write your program in any one of the 16 languages that we support and use our libraries For your language to embed a web assembly runtime and execute LASM code and call the functions inside that LASM code without having to deal with all of the pointer magic and tracking offsets and sizes of moving data from in your program natively into the web assembly runtime and Then in reverse. So for example, if I wanted to call a function that was compiled from rust in my Python program ecstism makes it particularly easy to load a library in Python Call that web assembly function that was compiled from rust and Give it some complex data Maybe like a big string or a JSON blob and then get that same kind of complex data back out It's classically known that web assembly can be difficult for some developers to use when they get beyond the Famous ad example most most tutorials with web assembly use an ad function because it's easy to demonstrate you know, I can give two integers in and get an integer out and You know, that's convenient because web assembly is primitive types are limited to 32 and 64 bit integers and floats And so when you want to start to use more complex data It becomes a challenge for some developers nexus and makes it really easy for developers to get beyond that hurdle We recently announced a product, which is the first of kind of a suite of Observability and security and monitoring Analysis tools that will release for my assembly users This product called mod surfer and Mod surfer acts as a system of record for all of your web assembly code You want to track, you know modules that are being used inside of your infrastructure or that you as a developer or Compiling and want to get some insights into what are all the imports and exports the function signatures of the module? Help me to debug code and then also a validation tool It lets you ensure that your web assembly code isn't doing anything or has any functions in it that you don't expect it to So from a security perspective Mod surfer provides teams with some you know, pretty compelling Functionality that hasn't been available before and if I'm not wrong mod surfer is an open source product, is that correct? Mod surfer is partially open source. Yeah, we provide the command line app Which is open source on github you can find that at github.com slash dilipso slash mod surfer And that pairs with our closed sourced system of record the application You can download for free though from dilipso.com and for developers using it locally on their machine It's completely free And then if you want to upgrade and use an enterprise version of this that can be deployed inside your own infrastructure To put into the pipeline or to track, you know a real-time production system You can come to us and get a license to do that We're happy to help you get started I was looking at you folks do have a lot of open source project that folks can find on github Talk a bit about why open source? What value does open source bring to new companies like dilipso open source is super important for us I mean, we use a lot of open source and you know, we have benefited from you know Folks in the past building incredible software that they've open sourced. So in a sense is a you know Participation in the community and giving back to other developers as well. On the other hand, you know a lot of retooling Is very sensitive to kind of the lower level code integrations that teams may be working with and from a security standpoint being able to see the source code that is being tightly integrated into the rest of your application Is important just for visibility and making sure that you understand what that code is doing It also gives a small company like us, you know a platform to distribute software in a very efficient way There are no sales involved. There is no, you know There's no one try to take orders or anything like that It's just a repo on the internet that developers can hopefully get excited about and check out and use As it makes sense for them. If you look at wasm cloud or whole web web assembly It is kind of not that taught it, but there are a lot of vendors. There are a lot of companies There are a lot of projects there. Talk a bit about the role you see for dilipso there What value are you bringing or what you know some of the key problems that you're seeing and you're like Hey, this is what we are solving in a unique way. Yeah, there are a bunch of companies doing really cool things in web assembly right now And I think there's a pattern, you know that We constantly see emerge over time as technology has this cyclical nature to it where a new idea comes in to play people get very excited about it want to experiment in a way or launch a company to solve a problem or to bring new products to market and A lot of the companies in the web assembly space are taking a stance that is very Specific to a particular use case, you know, you see cloud companies building serverless platforms or you see frameworks coming out for a browser application you know being it easier for developers to build browser applications and Alternatively we're taking a stance that says we want to build tooling that is Useful for developers in all of these different verticals. So independent of whether you're writing code That's gonna run in the cloud or writing code. That's gonna run in a browser Dilipso's tooling should help you accomplish your goal Independent of where your code runs and web assembly is fairly unique in that sense that it is portable across a bunch of different environments Because it's the same architecture Across those environments the same tooling will work in all those environments as well and that's very exciting for us Well, you know most of our isn't related to new but activism was released last year as an open source project And can you talk about what kind of adoption? What kind of use cases are you seeing of these two projects and products? Lex's in person foremost is being adopted on github quite regularly. We're seeing projects like server proxies or browser applications who want to provide their users with the ability to extend the functionality of their project, you know so for example There's a really cool proxy open source project by the team called maith in France the project called otteroshi and it is a server proxy that has embedded a Rx is a runtime to allow for plugins to be injected into the proxy path So if a request comes into the proxy and you want to change something about that request whereas the proxy Sins that request onto a back end a plugin can alter You know the path of execution or enhance that request in some in some regard, which is a really good use case for a plugin system And then monster for we're seeing used all over the place where people want to validate the WebAssembly module itself. So we have a github action that can be used for free and The github action looks for a WebAssembly module in your repo You know a compiled module as well as a check file, which is a YAML file that basically describes some expectations of that code So once you've compiled your source code to wasm Monster for validation tooling can take over and say hey you expected this code to use these functions But it also has this this function embedded in it or you expected not to use wazzy And this module expects wazzy to be available So it can check for some inconsistencies between the truth of the module and the expectation of its potential run runtime environment Earlier we were talking about the rule WebAssembly is playing in the modern cloud edward then we talked about the ecosystem which is growing and now we're also seeing the adoption of these projects also growing Where do you see? WebAssembly is heading when we look at because of course it's very hard to predict then also with open source project adoption depends on You don't even know who is using it's all in github, but what what kind of pattern you're seeing For the further evolution of web assembly I think that we'll see a lot of very interesting usage Where it web assembly spans multiple different environments, right? So like right now we're thinking about you know All cloud or all browser or all edge and web assembly provides this you know Consistent interface a consistent architecture so that depending on the compute At hand some of that code can be distributed across the cloud Some of the code can be on the edge some of the code can be on the browser But it's all compiled in the same format. So instead of having to wrangle together JavaScript code for the browser all the frameworks and dependencies that are required there, you know Docker containers for the cloud and stitch together all this complex architecture You could potentially have one unit of compute as web assembly and it distributes across a plethora of different targets cloud edge browser IoT etc So I think that'll be an interesting outcome for web assembly and I don't think we're terribly far away from seeing that come to light when we're talking about the web assembly I would also like to hear a bit about you know, what what are the things that you are planning, you know For the company that you know the projects you're working on products you're working on the problem that you are looking At solving for future. Yeah, I mean look we see a lot of really interesting growth in web assembly We're excited about the pace of innovation We again, like I mentioned are focused on kind of bringing tools that are agnostic to A bunch of different use cases or runtime environments And one of the things that we've you know felt was missing and are excited to contribute to Are some kind of generic observability tools to give more insight into what's actually happening in your web assembly code As it's executing or offline to determine, you know, what's the performance characteristics or various instrumentation details About my web assembly code again independent of its targeting the browser or iot or serverless or the cloud wherever I may be Bringing some kind of consistent view into what's happening inside web assembly code I think is something that has been missing and we're excited to be working on some, you know, interesting work there Steve thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about of course web assembly and Dalip so I would love to have you back on the show again, but I really appreciate your time today. Thank you Thanks so much for having me talk to you soon