What if your container image were a few megabytes instead of hundreds? WebAssembly (WASM) offers a radically lighter approach to running workloads on Kubernetes — right alongside your existing containers.
We'll dive into how WASM modules using WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) integrate into Kubernetes through containerd shims like runwasi. Using a Rust example, we'll demonstrate the dramatic reduction in image size and startup time compared to traditional containers. We'll explore what's production-ready today and where you should wait before adopting.
Beyond basics, we'll look at CNCF projects already running WASM in production and discuss where WebAssembly shines: plugin architectures benefiting from small, secure, sandboxed extensibility, and event-driven systems that scale quickly from zero. Whether optimizing for resource efficiency or exploring new isolation patterns, this session provides practical insights into WebAssembly on Kubernetes.