On the most recent episode of the Kubelist podcast, we had a conversation with Matt Butcher and Taylor Thomas who are two of the engineers behind Krustlet (and some other projects that you might know). This episode was eye opening for us -- the future of WebAssembly on the server seems bright, and this project is doing some pretty creative and clever integrations into the Kubernetes API. WebAssembly might be early, but we are hopeful as it’s maturing quickly!
Let’s start with the project on the podcast. If you want to learn more about Krustlet: a) check out the podcast, and b) go here and see the docs. This is pretty easy (“safe”) to install into a cluster if you want to experiment with WebAssembly but have tooling that depends on the Kubernetes API. 🎙️
This introductory guide is a must read when trying to get a handle on Krustlet. It goes through the how and the why of using WASM / WASI and the direction the project is headed. It also serves as a primer on how to get going with Krustlet itself. 📖
The WebAssembly System Interface is the specification and standard that gets referenced often when talking about running WebAssembly on the server. Right now, the docs here talk about C++ and Rust, but give the podcast a listen to hear about other language states, and the state of the WASI ecosystem in general.
On the podcast, Taylor mentions wasmCloud, and we definitely want to share. This is a platform to run WebAssembly modules, as a platform. I really appreciate the stated goal to “... strip wasteful boilerplate from the developer experience and return joy to the act of building distributed applications.” ☁️
This article from 2015 (ancient for CNCF land) is still relevant and does a great job of explaining the role that kubelet has inside a k8s cluster. If you want to understand what Krustlet is augmenting / replacing(!?) you need to understand what Kublet is doing!
This is an informative article that highlights the design decisions behind using WebAssembly in the CNCF ecosystem. It makes the case for WASM as a portable, fast, and secure option while comparing it to some other tooling and highlights its well-rounded design. 🚀
Now that KubeCon North America is a wrap, it’s that time to start writing CFPs for the next event. Really looking forward to Valencia in May, hoping things are safe and we can all meet IRL! Can’t wait for the proposals and seeing what's next in our ecosystem!