WasmCloud is now a CNCF incubating project, marking WebAssembly's readiness for enterprise adoption. With WASI P3 on the 2025 roadmap bringing native async support, idiomatic language toolchains, and the component model enabling "one team to patch 5,000 applications at once," WebAssembly is solving the fundamental platform engineering challenge of golden template sprawl.
Liam Randall is co-founder and CTO of Cosmonic, co-creator of CNCF WasmCloud, and serves on the Bytecode Alliance Technical Steering Committee (recently re-elected for a second term). He also chairs the WASI subgroup within the W3C's WebAssembly Community Group. Previously, he founded Critical Stack (one of the first commercial Kubernetes companies in 2014) and led Capital One's cloud transformation.
Bailey Hayes is a maintainer on WasmCloud and works at Cosmonic. Previously at SingleStore, a database company that also leveraged WebAssembly for query processing.
The Bytecode Alliance holds annual elections for its Technical Steering Committee. The 2025 roadmap is ambitious, with a focus on building out WASI P3 (the next major iteration of the WebAssembly Standardized Interfaces). WASI originally stood for WebAssembly System Interfaces but is better understood as standardized, modular interfaces for accessing HTTP, sockets, file systems, and other capabilities that were previously custom per-runtime.
WebAssembly used to be notoriously difficult to use, requiring deep knowledge of compilation incantations. The community has worked extensively with compiler and language runtime teams (TinyGo, Go upstream, Rust, etc.) to enable idiomatic experiences. Now, developers can go to the WasmCloud quickstart, write standard Go code, and compile seamlessly to WebAssembly components in the background.
"Writing Go for building WebAssembly components feels very much just like using Go. The Go STL is supported, and you're able to simply just write Go and then it compiles seamlessly to WebAssembly."
WasmCloud takes a collection of components (think "a box of Legos") and organizes them into applications that scale seamlessly to meet load, then back to zero with zero cold starts. It ships with:
A core WebAssembly module is pure compute (integers as far as the eye can see). A WebAssembly component wraps the core module with metadata about modular interfaces, structured types (strings, records, enums), imports, and exports. This enables:
"Through the magic of the component model, a string in Go is the same as a string in Rust."
Luke Wagner (key designer of the component model) calls this the "donut pattern." Platform engineering teams write a harness component in Rust that handles guard rails, secrets fetching, and middleware. Developers focus purely on business logic in their preferred language. At deployment, these compose together.
This solves the "original sin of platform engineering" where golden templates become snowflakes after each team copies them:
"In a large company we might have 5,000 unique teams that each patch one vulnerability one time. What we really want is a world where one team can patch 5,000 applications at once."
Cosmonic builds tooling for enterprises to adopt WebAssembly at scale. Their product, Cosmonic Connect, is built for platform engineers, loved by developers, and trusted by enterprises. They work with companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 (American Express, Adobe) to startups (MachineMetrics).
"The golden template has become the original sin of platform engineering. As soon as a single development team copies that golden template, we end up in the worst case world."
"What we really want is a world where one team can patch 5,000 applications at once, and that is what the WebAssembly component model enables."
"WebAssembly is finally ready for you to adopt today. It can make a huge difference in your cloud cost, in your developer productivity."
"The community is gigantic, it's collaborative, it's helpful, and it's the kind of community that I'm really proud to be a part of."