TrustRadius Insights for wasmCloud are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Exceptional Security Features: Several users have praised the platform for its exceptional security features. They have found it effortless to host secure and multi-tenant workloads, independent of the underlying network architecture or geography. This streamlined security approach has helped reduce code bloat and enhance application security.
Simplicity of Deployment Model: Many reviewers have highlighted the simplicity of the deployment model as a strong point of the platform. They find it easy to build a global platform that can run and scale anywhere, regardless of location. The location agnostic feature adds flexibility and convenience for developers, while small portable binaries contribute to an uncomplicated deployment process.
Multi-Language Support: A number of users appreciate the multi-language support provided by the platform. It allows for independent development in different languages, enabling collaboration between developers using languages like Rust and Go. This ployglot capability facilitates efficient teamwork and expands possibilities for developers.
In our R&D group, we are looking at wasmCloud as a potential product to use for the development of our next-generation distributed intelligence platform. We intend to run distributed applications all across the electric grid to handle new use cases such as local intelligence, machine learning, power flow coordination, and enhancement of grid resiliency for tomorrow's electric grid. WASM-based applications give us the portability to run any application on any platform that we choose in the future.
Pros
Small portable binaries
Enhanced application security
Independent development of actors and capabilities
Cons
Programming language adoption for creating WASM binaries
Runtime updating/upgrading
Likelihood to Recommend
Non-embedded IoT and distributed applications are a pretty good fit.
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Research & Development (10,001+ employees)
Most modern technology stacks have acquired a large volume of overhead with various niches occupied and maintained by highly skilled and highly paid experts. Companies that aren't forced to acknowledge the problem of legacy systems have been opting for frameworks that are tightly coupled to cloud vendors such as AWS Lambda. Lambda gives them a narrow scope to focus on core business logic but little freedom to get outside of the walled garden. WasmCloud could upend all of that and give developers and business owners new ways to run their business on-prem, on edge, or back in the cloud. I use wasmCloud to simplify my day-to-day work, it lets me get to business and gets out of my way to write code that gets work done. I recommend anyone doing any level of prototyping work focus on what wasmCloud has to offer.
Pros
Host density of workloads
Streamlined security approach to writing code and reducing bloat
Interoperability of modules written in different languages
Cons
Simplified open-source model for on-boarding devs, i.e. bare host no elixir/GUI
Home-labbers guide to wasmCloud
Spark more community involvement for capability providers
Likelihood to Recommend
If you want to start pivoting your legacy code into a serverless paradigm this is the platform to target. If you want to start moving away from walled gardens and back into a space where code isn't centralized, costs can be offset by utilizing customer or edge hardware this is the platform to focus on. If you want a model that will scale well past many of the existing serverless frameworks, that won't get caught up in the security weaknesses of current paradigms this is what you need to invest in. If you want modern code to interact with legacy code in a safe way that doesn't expose vulnerabilities you can't patch against wasmCloud is awesome. If you want to write simple code that can jump from cloud to cloud to the user or edge node check it out!
I am evaluating wasmCloud as an entry point to introduce the enterprise to server side webassembly. At the moment, I am using it as a platform to deploy custom units of business logic to ARM based AWS servers. We are trying to identify if webassembly can close some gaps that are introduced by migrating to ARM based architectures.
Pros
Ployglot - we have people writing code in Rust and Go that just work together
Simple concept. Once people are explained the actor/provider model, the tend to see the benifits
Fast. Without the boilerplate, we get business logic out the door and deployed quickly
Cons
Its a new approach to software engineering...so provide a gentle introduction to new comers that allows them to see why this path is the better path
DevEx. Debugging and troubleshooting is difficult ATM
Provide literature as to how we (engineers) and convince leadership to take a gamble on this new approach to software
Likelihood to Recommend
I believe its a better solution to AWS Lambda, GCP CodeRun, etc. Small pieces of logic that need to run for short bursts and provide multicloud support
I am a maintainer of wasmCloud. I contribute features and fixes to the wasmCloud CLI “wash” as well as to various other wasmCloud projects. I am involved in making decisions about the long-term direction of the project. While I have not used wasmCloud in my work at Google, I use it often for personal side projects. I also participated in a tech demo of wasmCloud to Google engineers.
Pros
Security
Developer Experience
Ease of Use
Cutting Edge Technology
Multi-Language Support
Cons
Maturity
Self-Hosting
Support for more external services needs to be built
Likelihood to Recommend
wasmCloud is well suited for enterprise software. It is a secure-by-default platform, with support for any language that can compile to WebAssembly, and an excellent boilerplate-free developer experience. It also solves many routing & service discovery problems that were difficult to solve with the existing cloud infratstructure mainstays, such as Kubernetes. I think of wasmCloud as a blending of two “previous generation” cloud computing revolutions - Docker containers and Kubernetes, adding in two great new technologies in WebAssembly and NATS, and coming out with one cohesive package that is easier to use for developers and those managing production software deployments, as well as considerably more secure.
wasmCloud allows Lofty to scale safely to meet the challenges of our clients. Our use case was one typically where we would have deployed microservices, but the platform and ease of actor development allowed us to use a new architecture that vastly reduced our security profile through wasm instead of containers. The simplified platform also meant no kubernetes was required, further reducing the attack surface.
Pros
Secure communication
Simplicity of Deployment Model
Actor Development ease
Cons
More details on self-hosting platforms
Securing providers and trust chains
Simpler Actor languages and deployments (no Makefiles)
Likelihood to Recommend
wasmCloud is well suited to dominate the microservices space under a new paradigm, and to do so in a way that is more secure for end users. Simplifying the platform deployment as well will go a long way towards making it ubiquitous in edge compute environments. Observability will also be a key factor as the microservices eventually become complex.
Red Badger is a consultancy that specialises in digital product transformation, working with large organisations to help them deliver value quickly and efficiently. As part of this, we help build digital product, platform and capability. We recommend wasmCloud and Cosmonic to our clients as a game-changing, next generation platform that is also cloud vendor agnostic, efficient and performant. It can really help transform our clients' ability to move fast. We particularly love how wasmCloud dramatically simplifies the art of building and deploying modern, distributed, multi-cloud web applications to the point where they become super easy to build and maintain. We have also found that clients who have grown by acquisition — having multiple clouds and on premise platforms — can easily combine everything into one homogenous global platform.
Pros
portable, lightweight workloads that can run and scale literally anywhere (location agnostic)
great developer experience (DX), focusing on ease of use, time and cost efficiency, and fun. Engineers can focus on core business value rather than non-functional boilerplate code.
security is at the heart of the platform, making it trivial to host secure, multi-tenant, zero-trust workloads for next-gen distributed architectures
multi-cloud and vendor agnostic. Easy to build a global platform that is independent of underlying network architecture or geography
Cons
Whilst wasmCloud's genius, in my opinion, is to provide full platform capability just using vanilla WebAssembly, there is no debate that WebAssembly is young on the standards front. The emerging component model is key to WebAssembly adoption. I would love to see some more of wasmCloud's great ideas filter back into the current standardization efforts
Likelihood to Recommend
wasmCloud is absolutely superb (and a game-changer) for greenfield products, where a micro-service (or nano-service) approach is being embraced. I would have no concerns recommending it for new builds. It works less well, IMO, where an application is already established on, say, Kubernetes. Whilst there are good technical options to build hybrid platform (and gradually migrate services from legacy to wasmCloud) there is still an amount of work required to rebuild (or at least re-compile) services to WebAssembly before porting — you can't just lift and shift. As the platform matures I have no doubt that this will become easier to do.
