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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this landing page has so many buzzwords I don't quite understand what the application/project itself is, but I do understand it's universal, runs everywhere and can run anything anywhere.

Could someone who knows what it is, give a simpler description? Is it a OS/kernel? Runtime? Orchestrator? Self-hosted platform? Cloud platform?

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k8s is for docker containers, this thing is like k8s but for wasm (and even uses similar apis).

Ok, so wasmCloud is like Kubernetes, but then I don't understand their tagline: "Build, manage, and scale Wasm apps across any cloud, K8s, or edge" or the "Run wasmCloud standalone or on Kubernetes" part.

Why would you want to run a orchestrator (wasmCloud) on top of another orchestrator (Kubernetes)? Are they competitors? No, then it wouldn't make sense to run it on Kubernetes, so that makes them complements?

You use k8s to manage the machines where wasmCloud runs, and wasmCloud to manage the WASM apps that run on top of it. That's at least my understanding.

And then you run QEMU-WASM[1] on that so you can run your Docker containers safely inside a Linux VM...

[1]: https://ktock.github.io/qemu-wasm-demo/

Gary was a visionary: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

As one of the co-founders of CNCF wasmCloud, I can say this talk was ABSOLUTELY an inspiration for what we've been working towards!

That's what people do in enterprises because they have security controls and processes around k8s with too much investment. It's a no-go telling people to "just run this binary on this VM/baremetal machine", understandably.

We've got a few examples on our website from users that (in my opinion) use wasmCloud more for its strengths as a distributed computing platform. Often there's central k8s infrastructure where wasmCloud runs and connects to wasmCloud hosts running on edge devices. https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2024-10-22-webassembly-adoption-t....

Me personally, I run all my side projects off of a wasmCloud binary on Oracle's always free tier instance and it's been pretty awesome.

Apparently something that can replace docker or build on top of it. Buzzword here once again.

It's a grift as far as I can tell.

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