Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by callahad 1373 days ago
> > What would it take to build a multitenant web service where customer code is isolated using wasmtime, like the one like described in the post?

> See suborbital linked above.

For a real world example of someone using Suborbital's platform for exactly that, see https://avenue.so/blog/avenue-launches-custom-filters-transf...

It is indeed early days, but we're pretty confident that the opportunity is real. Take webhooks. With webhooks, your customers have to bring and manage their own infrastructure. That's a pain in the ass. Everywhere that supports webhooks should also support Just Running My Damn Code. Like with GitHub Actions.

How does GitHub do it? Simple: They're owned by Microsoft. GitHub can bury the problem in an ungodly deluge of cheap virtual machines from their sister company, Azure.

You aren't owned by Microsoft, so how will you Just Run Some Code? You're going to use WebAssembly. Specifically, in a year or two, you're going to integrate some sort of off-the-shelf commodity product that's powered by WebAssembly.

Suborbital is one shot at what that future might look like. We'll be talking more about this in the next few weeks. And it's not just us: a lot of the serverside WebAssembly folks will be at Cloud Native WASM Day at KubeCon next month... say hello if you're there!

1 comments

In what use cases can user-provided wasm realistically replace webhooks? It seems to me that in plenty of cases, you'd end up needing something like webhooks anyway. For instance, I use Stripe, and I implement their webhook to handle completed checkouts. My webhook implementation needs to update my database, send email using my email service provider credentials, etc. I doubt that running my own wasm code on Stripe's infrastructure would make things simpler. But I'd like to learn more on use cases where user-provided wasm really would be better.