 Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Anizic. I am the CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I'm here today as one of the program committee members of our first Cloud Native WASM day. I'm excited to be here to kind of show up and present a new conference to our wonderful Cloud Native community. I'm here with my other program committee member, Colin, who will talk a little bit about history of WASM and how it's relevant these days in our Cloud Native ecosystem. Cool. Thanks again, intro, Chris. My name is Colin Eberhardt, and I'm the Technology Director of a company called Scott Logic, which is a small UK-based software consultancy. And I'm also, as people who know me, they all know I'm a complete WebAssembly enthusiast. Now, to give you a little bit of historical context, WebAssembly is quite a new and fast-moving technology. It was originally born in the browser and addressed the age-old problem of how you bring other languages to the browser. For those of you who've been around for a while, I'm sure you remember Flash, or if you're as old as me, things like Java Applets. It's always been a challenge. The plug-in model caused some significant tensions. WebAssembly itself was developed really quite rapidly over a period of a few years, building primarily on the work of Mozilla and ASMJS, and it was launched relatively recently in 2019. And at around that time, it also moved under W3C alongside CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. And for me, this was a real landmark for the Web. It's the first time in the 25-year history that there has now been another language that you can use, another language which is a first-class citizen of the Web, rather than the plug-in model where they are effectively a second-class citizen. So it's hard to understate the significance of that event. So WebAssembly is a fantastic technology, but unfortunately I think the name is a little bit wrong in some regards. Firstly, it's not really an assembly language, but you'd only be a pedant if you pointed that out. But more importantly, it's not just for the Web. So the WebAssembly runtime itself is secure and sandboxed, which was a must for the Web browser. The Web is probably one of the most attacked platforms there is, so it had to be secure. It also has a very lightweight and platform-independent instruction set. And it's these features that make it a very desirable runtime for many other use cases. So since the inception of the technology, people have been using it for various different non-browser-based applications. So for example, in the blockchain world, WebAssembly makes quite an ideal smart contract engine. In the past, Ethereum had used their own proprietary language, Solidity. In the future, through WebAssembly, they'll be bringing a range of modern programming languages to blockchain. Also, IoT, again, it allows us through being platform-agnostic to create a much broader ecosystem. And finally, at Cloud Native, the reason many of you are here, WebAssembly gives, again, a lightweight and secure isolation model. It's ideal for running cloud functions or running code on the edge or running code within proxies. It's an ideal runtime for those scenarios. And finally, I guess on a personal note, I think WebAssembly could have a greater impact beyond the Web than it does within the browser. So I think it has a great history within Cloud Native. Thank you, Colin, for that quick synopsis and history of WebAssembly. Personally, very excited. Within the CNCF, we've already had some early adoption of WASM-related technologies in the Envoy project, which is one of our fancy service proxies. They've been basically ripping out and replacing their existing kind of extension mechanisms, which was powered by Lua, which is a lightweight scripting engine, but fairly heavyweight. And from them moving from Lua to WASM, it has helped make Envoy lighter weight and a little bit more flexible in dealing with different languages for you to write filters that support Envoy. We also have a lot of experimentation in the wider Cloud Native community. Folks in Microsoft have been working on a new kubelet Kubernetes engine called Crustlet, which basically allows you to take advantage of running WASM within a Kubernetes context. So to me, like all this innovation is happening kind of at the perfect time where I think over the next couple of years, you're going to see WASM stretched in new environments from the edge to cloud-based environments such as Kubernetes. Colin and I are both glad to welcome you to our first Cloud Native WASM day, and hopefully you could use this occasion to learn more about the technology of how it's being used both inside and outside the browser. And we hope to do many of more of these events in the future. So from Colin and I, thank you for attending, and we hope you learned something new. Thank you. Enjoy.