WebAssembly, AKA Wasm, first hit theCUBE community radar during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe last May.

Less than six months later, the technology was riding a wave of hype as everyone at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA wanted to know more about the binary instruction format that was designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages.

“I expected to come here shouting into the void: ‘Hey, anybody, somebody, let me tell you about web assembly,’” said Matt Butcher (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Fermyon Technologies Inc. “Instead, it’s been people coming to us and saying, ‘What are the problems it’s solving?’ People are literally stopping us in restaurants and walking down the street.”

Butcher spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the excitement around WebAssembly and the different use cases for the technology. (* Disclosure below.)

WebAssembly enables a new wave of microservices

The buzz is because WebAssembly has arrived at the right time, solving problems that not so long ago seemed intractable, according to Butcher. Fermyon is one of several companies that are innovating on the WebAssembly open-source project, with fellow KubeCon attendees and theCUBE alumni Docker Inc. and Cosmonic Corp. also developing tooling based on Wasm. But the community is supportive rather than competitive, with “everybody kind of finding a neat little niche,” Butcher said.

Use cases for WebAssembly are diverse, addressing problems in edge computing, serverless and the internet of things. While Cosmonic is focused on providing high-level security guarantees for enterprise customers, Fermyon’s Frictionless WebAssembly Platform is aimed at easing the developer experience by removing roadblocks to building and running serverless applications. The company was formed with a very specific goal in mind, according to Butcher.

“We wanted this serverless architecture that executed in sub one millisecond to create a new wave of microservices,” he said.

Fermyon has achieved that goal, providing the speed where developers can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less, according to Butcher. Next on the company’s to-do list is to develop Fermyon to run real-world applications that solve real-world problems.

First up is to discover what developers are trying to build with the Fermyon platform. Once they have established that the company will “relentlessly focus on making that easier and solving the real-world problem that way,” Butcher stated. “That’s the crucial thing that’s gonna drive us out of that early hype stage into a well-adopted technology.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022 event:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE