Tim McCallum - The path from on-premises infrastructure to zero-infrastructure: Powered by WebAssembly
Traditional web applications, which use the on-premises architecture model, require many bricks-and-mortar components. These include buildings, servers, generators, cabling, air-conditioning services and much more. In addition to this, there are costs associated with hiring, housing and managing professional Information Technology (IT) staff, in areas such as system administration, security and so forth. There is no doubt that moving to cloud computing solutions provide reductions in cost and increases in efficiency. However, the paradigm has shifted and the stand-alone, stack-based, WebAssembly (Wasm) Virtual Machine (VM) architecture has ushered in a way for untrusted code to be executed in a sandboxed environment. Second State has built what can be best described as an Anything as a Service offering for the open web. Now users from a myriad of different schools, startups, projects and companies can efficiently share cloud server infrastructure safely without jumping through any of the traditional cloud computing hoops. Anyone can launch and execute custom code via the open web without being tied into a monolithic cloud provider. No usernames, no passwords, no proprietary authentication or access control. Just secure HTTP requests on the open web. In addition to changing server-based services, this new technology brings end-user apps back to the web, where they belong. No more app store rules, review processes or proprietary application frameworks. Now, Javascript, APIs and Markup are all that are required to build sophisticated applications for the web.