WASM in the Enterprise: Secure, Portable, and Ready for Business

The presentation titled WASM in the Enterprise: Secure, Portable, and Ready for Business was delivered by Andrea Peruffo, who is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, focused on open-source development, distributed systems, and compilers.

The talk covered several key topics related to WebAssembly (WASM) including:

• Introduction to WASM: Positioned as a portable binary execution format, initially used in browsers to execute complex tasks more efficiently than JavaScript.
• Potential of WASM beyond Browsers: Discussed its applicability in server-side environments for creating polyglot interfaces and plugin systems due to its ease of embedment into host programming languages.
• Technical Advantages: Highlighted WASM’s secure sandbox environment, ensuring controlled code execution and its permanent status as a web standard.
• Use Cases: Detailed practical use cases such as JRuby for running on JVM with WASM, TrinoDB for efficient UDF execution, and Debezium for message transformation.

In addition, the session provided insights into overcoming challenges with WASM integration, particularly focusing on implementing WASM in Java environments using the Chicory runtime, emphasizing techniques to ensure optimal execution speed and efficiency. The presentation aimed at not only showcasing WASM's capabilities but also providing practical strategies to handle initial integration challenges, making it a valuable tool for enterprise-level applications.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

WebAssembly (WASM) is emerging as a powerful tool beyond its browser origins, enabling safer, more flexible, and more efficient execution across a wide range of enterprise applications.

In this session, we’ll take a hands-on look at real-world use cases, including:

• When and why you might need WASM to bootstrap an ecosystem purely on the JVM -- JRuby
• How to make slow-starting interpreters practical for fast UDFs in databases by reducing startup overhead -- TrinoDB
• Running WASM sandboxes on the hot path while minimizing serialization overhead through lazy access to host memory -- Debezium

We’ll explore the challenges we faced integrating WASM into existing platforms, how we overcame them, and what this means for Java and modern enterprise architectures.

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of WASM's growing role in the enterprise world and a set of practical techniques to overcome initial hiccups and doubts and start using the technology in their projects.