The combination of WebAssembly and Kubernetes is an interesting development. Where traditional containers can be large and take time to deploy, even using slimmed-down dedicated host Linux distributions, WebAssembly applications simply require a standard runtime and, as they are dedicated binary files, need much less in the way of system resources. This makes them an attractive alternative to containers for applications that need to scale rapidly or must operate in constrained environments.Microsoft’s support for WebAssembly in its Azure Kubernetes Service is a big vote of confidence in this technology, and its recent addition of support for the runwasi containerd shim simplifies deployment by using Kubernetes to manage WebAssembly code directly.
