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I hadn't really been interested in WebAssembly until I read about the component model and the fact that I can run Wasm components on the server.

That led me to wasmCloud[1]. As the article says, Wasm on the server isn't a winner yet, but it has a chance.

[1] https://wasmcloud.com

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That seems... weirdly indirect, when you can run binaries directly on the server. If it's a VM or isolation you need, there's Docker. It feels just like "server-side rendering" of front-end UI libraries/frameworks like react and co. But maybe I'm missing something.

What I get is isolation, so I can run untrusted customer code as a Wasm component knowing it runs in a secure sandbox.

Also, scaling across clouds, edge, on-prem with minimal effort.

Another benefit I enjoy now is changing links between components at runtime. I can for example deploy v2.0.0 of a component and send traffic to it by simply updating a link - and reverse it should things break.

All that comes at a much lighter cost in terms of actual $, but also size (kilobytes/megabytes vs megabytes/gigabytes with Docker containers)

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