Life-Cycle Management in WebAssembly Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by Cosmonic

Cosmonic

Cosmonic, the WebAssembly Platform firm or company, recently raised a seed-funding to the amounts of 8.5 Dollars in a round, lead by another firm, Vertex Ventures. This seed-funding got used by Cosmonic to launch a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) version of its WebAssembly platform, which is a distributed-application-development platform. The PaaS by Cosmonic got built on an open-source cloud known as wasm or the wasmCloud. The wasmCloud is currently a Cloud-Native-Computing Foundation sandbox project. The project got formulated and implemented as a message-bus based on the NATS open-source messaging system. It connects the different instances of wasmCloud, which is very similar to a service-mesh in Kubernetes.

The wasmCloud uses a hot-pluggable component model that defines various applications, which is a collection of standardized components. As per Cosmonic CEO, Liam Randall, the WebAssembly platform allows all common services available everywhere. Previously, these common-systems had to be authenticated before distribute-tracing with logging and metrics into each web-application.

WasmCloud

The components of wasmCloud provide high-level capabilities as it gets defined by an interface, which describes how these components behave. For instance, components having the same interfaces can be swapped out online as per requirements. A combination of wasmCloud with a message-bus makes the components available from anywhere in the WebAssembly platform of Cosmonic mesh. This way, all applications get converted to a collection of standard infrastructure components, which can be made available anywhere through the Cosmonic mesh with app-specific-business logic. Now, developers get to focus on app-specific-business logic by spending less time worrying about any infrastructure issues. The teams that design the WebAssembly platform focus on building high-quality services composed of infrastructure elements as aforementioned. Connecting swappable components with automatic networking facilitates a fully online activity for change and maintenance.

Cosmonic is bringing in a software revolution that gives more options to developers as per Liam Randall. Users and developers can use all the capabilities provided by Cosmonic to extend their cloud-capabilities while adding new innovative & non-existing features when required. The WebAssembly PaaS allows the users to design, build, test, and run the same code anywhere such as the private-cloud, public-cloud, or a hybrid-cloud system. The WebAssembly pioneer Cosmonic mainly focuses on those users, developers, and customers who operate their own capital assets while being interested in distributed applications. Some of the examples include financial services, power companies, manufacturing units, and other similar organizations that have custom-software needs, which require a more distributed and hybrid approach.

Challenge for Cosmonic

The challenge for Cosmonic is to create an interface with existing applications and data sources that are not using the WebAssembly platform. The required data makes all important applications useful for business. These data currently get segregated in existing data stores. Even with the existing challenge, WebAssembly is the future of distributed computing cloud systems.

Benefits of WebAssembly or WasmCloud as a PaaS Service

It is a first-of-its-kind PaaS system that can be made global in minutes from its initial blueprint or napkin-sketch. With the Cosmonic PaaS, developments get run seamlessly anywhere. The abstraction of application libraries frees developers to bring in various innovative elements.

Cosmonic at KubeCon

At KubeCon in 2022, Cosmonic launched its new innovation in WebAssembly or wasmCloud. It got presented as a lightweight, low-boilerplate environment that simplifies web-app-development. It allows developers to run all apps at any scale anywhere in minutes. The Cosmonic platform that got built on wasmCloud is a fast-growing Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. Cosmonic developed a platform-agnostic environment for PaaS with composed-distributed-applications and Wasm. They ran them in the cloud-system at the edge. For developing the WebAssembly PaaS platform, Cosmonic combined portability and flexibility that comes with an intuitive-suite of Wasm-powered tools. The features and services of these tools remove complexities from application development and its management.

Modern Development Disruption

As mentioned, Cosmonic seamlessly scales applications across clouds, devices, and CPUs thwarting the phenomenon of modern development disruption. The move by Cosmonic emphasizes on distributed-application-development process. Earlier, there were complexities while building modern distributed applications that decreased the developer-productivity. Cosmonic simplifies the complexities through treating all non-functional application requirements as services behind abstraction. The WebAssembly platform reduces the friction and burden felt by developers due to complexities by making common components as part of the platform. The Wasm and WasmCloud shepherd the next wave of software development through filling many gaps. Cosmonic provides a write-once, deploy-multiple-times promise for developers while abstracting complexity through their WebAssembly PaaS platform.

Key Features of Cosmonic Platform

The platform designed by Cosmonic helps developers to scale-up apps within minutes. Super constellations allow developers to use their own data centres including cloud resources and laptops to combine & scale Cosmonic-managed resources from a single and unified interface.

The WebAssembly PaaS platform by Cosmonic can be run from any scale, edge, or cloud. The combination components include an integration of Cosmonic and customer hosted components. DevOps gets untangled smoothly without any complexities as in Cosmonic; developers can interface smoothly with operations at a higher level than DevOps.

The platform provides developers with options to remove time-consuming processes like configurations, security, and updates. The Platform-as-a-Service inherently increases the security of applications by executing all code in a secure, stateless, and reactive sandbox.

According to Liam Randall, Kubernetes has helped developers to enable the shift of data into the public cloud. A lot of challenges came with the process that made it difficult for all cloud native developers to deliver next-generation, seamless, cloud native experiences that securely runs everywhere. WebAssembly when used on its own and in combination with Kubernetes powers portable and secure experiences that run from anywhere.

Life-Cycle Management in WebAssembly Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by Cosmonic

Cosmonic recently announced that its WebAssembly (Wasm) PaaS Platform is now in the public-beta stage. In the open beta stage, Cosmonic has introduced certain new features. With the help of these features, developers can integrate Wasm into existing applications more easily than before. The applications include Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes, which integrates Kubernetes clusters and WebAssembly applications that run in the Cosmonic platform.

Cosmonic company got co-founded by Liam Randall, who previously co-founded one of the first Kubernetes companies named Critical Stack that got acquired by Capital One. Liam Randall has experience in working on projects like Cloud Custodian and later joined Stacklet. Currently, the WebAssembly community is building the necessary niche and ecosystem around the core-technology of Wasm as PaaS. This makes the technology palatable to large organizations. Adobe and Cloudflare use Wasm in production despite the tooling being rudimentary. Importantly, Cosmonic launches Wasm as PaaS whereas lot of other teams focus on WebAssembly as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS).

As per the Engineering Director of Cosmonic, in the next three to five years, all FaaS platforms will start using WebAssembly. Cosmonic does not lock into the specific-platform-architecture. The PaaS can also be used as a FaaS; developers can build Microservices, monoliths, and event-driven architectures with Wasm. As known, WebAssembly promises all developers that they will be able to write their code once and run it from anywhere. With the Cosmonic platform, developers can focus on assembling the different components of their applications and run that code anywhere as emphasized by Cosmonic in its Wasm PaaS product.

The WebAssembly Component Model is going to be the final abstraction in this innovative technology. According to Liam Randall, the Wasm Component Model turns application libraries into building blocks that get aligned to contracts for abstraction, for global databases, key-value storage, or message queues. At runtime, developers can attach these building blocks to completely different implementations in various languages with the same interface. The PaaS of Cosmonic gets enabled by the WasmCloud application runtime, which got donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Wadm, another open-source project by Cosmonic is a declarative application manager for WasmCloud applications. With Wadm, developers can keep the infrastructure they require that gets updated with all the latest features.

As mentioned, Cosmonic provides a PaaS for multi-component WebAssembly (Wasm) applications. It has built its PaaS with various capabilities that range from life-cycle management to a registry. This gets done through a series of enhancements, which were launched on September 6, 2023. With the new enhancements, the Cosmonic PaaS now offers the application life-cycle management through Wadm: WasmCloud Application Deployment Manager, app view: a user interface (UI) that manages declarative applications through Wasm, custom-names for HTTPS standpoints, and a managed globally-resilient-registry. Cosmonic PaaS got launched from the company website. Cosmonic Wasm PaaS can spread an application from a laptop to a multi-cloud deployment through a few lines of JSON or YAML.

Cosmonic is introducing a User Interface (UI) to manage applications through Wasm with Cosmonic App View. This User Interface interfaces with Wadm applications defined with the Open Application Model (OAM). The App View includes an in-UI YAML editor and YAML validation. The Cosmonic Managed Registry provides allocated storage for all development components, which gets controlled with Cosmonic credentials. Through Cosmonic PaaS, personalized HTTPS standpoints and wormholes provide developers with ways to customize wormhole domains, which control secure traffic.

The enhancements of Cosmonic got launched in the wake of WASI-Preview 2, which is the WebAssembly System Interface that reaches minimum viable product status and Wasm Component Model nearing completion.

Conclusion

Cosmonic has enabled the WebAssembly Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for the life-cycle management of apps, as mentioned above. The innovative tool is very-useful to all developers who work in this niche and domain.