The future of serverless
There’s a lot of work going on in the WebAssembly community to define a specification for a component model. This is intended to be a way to share binaries and libraries, allowing code to interoperate easily. The Hyperlight Wasm tool offers the option of compiling a development branch with support for WebAssembly Components, though it’s not quite ready for prime time. In practice, this will likely be the basis for any final build of the platform, as the specification is being driven by the main WebAssembly platforms.
One point that Microsoft makes is that Wasm isn’t only language-independent, it’s architecture-independent, working against a minimal virtual machine. So, code written and developed on an x64 architecture system will run on Arm64 and vice versa, ensuring portability and allowing service providers to move applications to any spare capacity, no matter the host virtual machine.
Microsoft is driving toward a serverless future for Azure, and tools like Hyperlight will become a key component of its infrastructure. Support for WebAssembly rapidly increases Hyperlight’s utility, and as this functionality develops, it’s likely to become the focus. For now, Hyperlight and Hyperlight Wasm are very much in development, and we can expect features to change as the platform evolves. Once it’s stable, we should then see the development of much-needed management tools that will provide the necessary user experience for deploying and managing code.
