Wasm has some clear advantages over containers. It’s smaller, which makes it quicker to transfer over the network; it starts up faster; and it’s built with a stronger security model. But despite all that, Wasm is still playing catch-up when it comes to the mature tooling and ecosystem that containers enjoy.
In the previous chapter, we looked at how to package Wasm applications as container images. Using the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format, we tap into the rich tooling built for containers—most notably, Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is the standard way to manage containers in production. It takes care of scaling, load balancing, service discovery, and more. In this chapter, we’ll look at how Wasm can plug into that same system and how we can take advantage of the Kubernetes feature set to run and manage Wasm workloads.