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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, and particularly because I'm working on a Webassembly based alternative to Kubernetes:

What would you do differently if you could start from scratch?

Please, for the love of interop, do not use GRPC. Not every language supports it (JSON is way better anyway). There are a number of times I’ve wanted to build on something in k8s. But I’m not learning go just to write an api controller. I’m not going to write a GRPC implementation just to write an api controller in my language of choice either.

Full disclosure: I really hate GRPC as a wire protocol.

When I used it for ruby. I was totally fascinated by it. Wow. It was a horrible experience. Lack of proper support made everyone hard.

Loved the concepts though.

Worse than using a binary protocol and an IDL, I think, are the myths that gRPC proponents seem to believe: e.g. you can't delete fields and all fields are optional, ergo <voila> you now have guaranteed backwards compatibility.

Very curious where you see the advantage of using Webassembly there. Presumably this is not running in a browser.

Webassembly is also gaining steam for server workloads due to several advantages (less overhead, better capability based security, composability, ...).

See Spin [1], Wasmcloud [2], Lunatic [3], etc.

My system is based on a distributed Webassembly runtime.

The reason for taking inspiration from Kubernetes is making deployment of distributed workloads on that runtime easy.

A nice benefit for a Kubernetes alike system is that the equivalent to operators and controllers can be much more light-weight WASM actors that are easier to develop, deploy and scale.

[1] https://github.com/fermyon/spin

[2] https://github.com/wasmCloud/wasmCloud

[3] https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic

Even better (and I expect you're aware of this already), you can run Webassembly workloads under Kubernetes control:

https://krustlet.dev/

Yeah, krustlet is great for integrating into existing Kube deployments. I'm just tackling the problem from the other side.

Webassembly as a desirable server side technology... I suppose I need to recontextualize what I understand webassembly to be. Hmm.

It's like the JVM but more languages can run on it and it has buy in from more companies. Imagine all the promises of Java in the 90s/2000s but the open source community is actually interested in it.

Is that actually true though, or is this more of an aspirational goal for WASM? The JVM runs an absolute ton of different languages.

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