Solo.io Leads Industry Effort to Standardize WebAssembly Module Format, Extending the Power to Cloud-Native Technologies

Solo.io, the software company that helps organizations adopt and operate innovative cloud native technologies, continues its efforts to  streamline, accelerate, and simplify WebAssembly (Wasm) adoption and use throughout the industry. Solo.io announces the WebAssembly OCI Image Specification, which defines a standard format for bundling and storing a Wasm module and its metadata as an OCI (Open Container Initiative) image in order to facilitate interoperability across different solutions.

WebAssembly is an open standard portable binary instruction format providing an embeddable and safe execution environment for platform extensions. WebAssembly has been adopted by the Envoy community for extending the Envoy Proxy and Envoy-based solutions like Gloo and Istio. Recently, Solo.io released the WebAssembly Hub, a community resource for building and sharing WebAssembly extensions for Envoy, with integration to Gloo and Istio out of the box. To standardize distribution and allow production adoption, Solo.io today provides specifications for WebAssembly OCI Images. The OCI is a lightweight, open governance structure for creating open industry standards for container formats and runtime.

“Early on, we realized that WebAssembly was a technology area that could make a significant impact throughout the technology stack,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io. “Many of our customers and partners share our enthusiasm for using WebAssembly to extend Envoy, and our goal is to accelerate its adoption by the community. This is why we built the WebAssemblyHub. In the process of building the Hub and discussing it with our customers, we worked to optimize the way WebAssembly modules are bundled. The OCI Image Specification announced today is based on this gained experience, which we share with the community to facilitate collaboration and accelerate innovation throughout the industry.”

“I’m really excited about the possibilities that WebAssembly brings to the Service Mesh space,” said Joe Searcy, technical staff member, T-Mobile. “Wasm really lowers the barrier to entry for developing Envoy Filters and makes adding custom business logic to the data plane accessible to most. We can start to build a real community around the technology with tools like WebAssembly Hub that centralizes and standardizes the storage and distribution of these Wasm artifacts. Great things are sure to come when the awesome folks in our community can collaborate and share their ideas in this space!”

All are encouraged to participate in and contribute to the WebAssembly OCI Image Specification here and visit WebAssembly Hub to build and share modules with the community.