Item: wasmCloud
Rating: 10
Author: Stuart Harris

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

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

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

Support Rating

The team is exceptionally helpful and friendly. They are deeply invested in helping users of wasmCloud in every way that they can. There is a great community, with good documentation, help on slack, and community meetings every week.

Key Insights

Do you think wasmCloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with wasmCloud's feature set?

Yes

Did wasmCloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of wasmCloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy wasmCloud again?

Yes

Usability

Great usability and user/developer experience is the single most important objective that the core team has.

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.

Industry-changing, next generation platform for everyone now!

Overall Satisfaction with wasmCloud