Better Serverless Computing With WebAssembly

What's the focus of your work these days?

The focus of my work is helping customers at Fastly adopt WebAssembly and serverless in general, whether that's from moving monolithic applications into microservices and serverless applications, or whether it's adopting new technologies like WebAssembly or figuring out how they can benefit from edge computing. What Fastly is working on is an edge cloud where you can get even closer to the users. So it's a new emerging technology. A lot of people have never worked with edge computing or serverless, so it's a lot of evangelizing.

What is the motivation behind your talk?

To get people excited about WebAssembly. There's been a lot of exciting specifications and new technologies around the WebAssembly ecosystem, but lack in real world wins. What I'd like to do is share why Fastly believes in WebAssembly, some of the exciting things we've been doing and have achieved and have in production, but then also theorize about the future. Look at things that we know are coming in the specs and then come up with ideas on what we can build with this.

How would you describe the persona and level of the target audience that attends this session?

I think it is really mixed. In my session, I assume that they will have an idea of what WebAssembly is, but by no means experts. I plan to do some intro, talk about WebAssembly and then also talk about things that are on a deeper level as well. But I'll probably lead into those. So I think generally people who are interested in the technology.

What would you like those that attend your session to walk away with?

Hype, that's really what this is about. There are loads of fantastic talks about the cool, deep down technical details of WebAssembly. And whilst I'll include some of those, this is really about using WebAssembly for real.