WebAssembly (Wasm) has long been touted as the next era of compute, with its portability, security, and efficiency. But many people still question if it is ready for production usage. Once rooted in browsers, Wasm has found a home at the edge, in serverless platforms, and in many of the CNCF projects you know and love. Early experiments often meant fumbling with custom ABIs, but the advent of the component model makes interoperability and composability a breeze. In this talk, David and Taylor, two of the Wasm WG chairs, will cover Wasm’s journey from its browser origins to its role as a building block of cloud-native applications. They’ll show how CNCF projects are leveraging Wasm today, from spinning up services to extending existing stacks, all without getting bogged down in bespoke ABIs. Then they’ll finish with a candid discussion about the component model, its strengths and weaknesses, and how you can successfully use it in your projects today.