Posted on November 12, 2024

CNCF projects highlighted in this post

wasmCloud logo

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept wasmCloud as a CNCF incubating project. 

wasmCloud, an open source project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), enables teams to build and run polyglot applications made up of reusable WebAssembly (Wasm) components. This allows applications to operate resiliently and efficiently across diverse environments—in the cloud, on Kubernetes, in data centers, or at the edge.

By using Wasm as the application artifact, wasmCloud decouples applications from underlying infrastructure, freeing developers to focus on feature development. It provides the tools to run Wasm components securely and efficiently and—instead of forcing thousands of developers to maintain the same libraries and capabilities in their applications—create a single set of reusable core applications.

“wasmCloud is a platform for platform engineers. It orchestrates componentized applications in a way that complements Kubernetes,” said Liam Randall, wasmCloud co-founder and Cosmonic CEO. “While Kubernetes abstracts and manages infrastructure, wasmCloud functions as a distributed application control plane, managing applications at scale. It integrates with Kubernetes, allowing organizations to extend their Kubernetes deployments to remote edges which maximizes the value of existing investments. We are humbled by the end user adoption and excited to see wasmCloud make this big move to the Incubator.” 

The project was created by Liam Randall and Kevin Hoffman during their time at a top 10 US bank. The project is currently led by Cosmonic CTO and Bytecode Alliance Technical Steering Committee member Bailey Hayes. wasmCloud was designed to solve the friction that application teams face in every enterprise when writing software and it has grown in popularity since being accepted into the CNCF Sandbox; it is now being deployed and maintained by engineers working in a host of organizations including Adobe, Orange, MachineMetrics, TM Forum member CSPs, and Akamai. 

Since joining the CNCF Sandbox, wasmCloud has matured and grown in popularity:

Adoption is growing amongst engineering teams working in a variety of sectors, attracted by the possibility of simplifying the way they build, run, and maintain applications at scale.

“wasmCloud is the most ambitious project around. It is attempting to revolutionize how software is developed, architected, and run, all while staying at the forefront of wider WebAssembly and WASI standards. I’m so proud of the team that has done so much over the past 4 years to get it to this point. The smartest and kindest group of people you’d ever want to work with.” – Colin Murphy, wasmCloud maintainer and Senior Software Engineer, Adobe

“CNCF incubation is a confirmation of the strength of the wasmCloud project and community. It has taken a lot of work to gain the right reputation within the wider cloud native landscape, and it’s paying off in project maturity, integrations and success stories. I’m incredibly grateful to our industry partners who pioneered real-world Wasm use cases. Incubation is a real indicator that wasmCloud is ready to integrate into any cloud native stack. I truly believe that a successful community makes a successful project, and I’m so proud of where we are today.” – Brooks Townsend, wasmCloud maintainer and Senior Engineer at Cosmonic

“As a longtime maintainer and contributor to CNCF projects, I am thrilled that wasmCloud has made it to incubating status. This is the culmination of 5 years of work from an ever-growing community that represents so many different parts of the technology landscape. The contributions that wasmCloud has made to the wider ecosystem and the adoption we see across software platforms, banking, IoT, and more is something that makes me extremely proud.”– Taylor Thomas, wasmCloud maintainer and engineering director, Cosmonic

“wasmCloud helps us build complex systems with a new perspective; it gives us a way to distribute workloads, compute, and feature requests in a way that just wasn’t possible before. A team of any size can start to see benefits very early in the development cycle.” – Luke Jones, Lattica co-founder and developer

“I am so excited to see wasmCloud enter incubating and sit alongside other major incubating and graduated projects like Kubernetes and Knative in the scheduling and orchestration section of the CNCF landscape. Components offer a fundamentally finer-grained abstraction than containers, like Kubernetes for WebAssembly, so wasmCloud provides a Wasm-native orchestrator to best take advantage of the unique properties that WebAssembly components can provide. Wasm-native works with cloud-native and runs seamlessly on Kubernetes or any other container execution engine like AWS Fargate, Microsoft AKS, or Google Cloud Run.” – Bailey Hayes, TSC director for Bytecode Alliance foundation, W3C WASI SG chair, CTO at Cosmonic

“wasmCloud’s acceptance into the CNCF incubator is a major milestone, marking the beginning of a new phase—one of collaboration, innovation, and the spread of WebAssembly across industries. It’s also a testament to the dedication of the entire community in pioneering the cloud-native Wasm space, and I’m proud to contribute towards expanding its ecosystem.”– Aditya Sal, wasmCloud contributor

Main Components:

Notable Milestones:

wasmCloud has several features and functionalities on the roadmap for Q4 and beyond including mult-tenancy, standards alignment, and deeper language support. Previous roadmaps can be viewed in the wasmCloud roadmap section in wasmCloud documentation.

As a CNCF-hosted project, wasmCloud is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. wasmCloud joins incubating technologies Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, CubeFS, Dragonfly, Emissary-Ingress, Falco, Flatcar, gRPC, in-toto, Keptn, Keycloak, Knative, Kubeflow, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenCost, OpenFeature, OpenKruise, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Thanos, and Volcano. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.