Wasm I/O 2025 - Barcelona, 27-28 March Slides: https://boxer-wasmio2025.spinup.site/ While containers have been pivotal in cloud computing, offering isolated environments for applications, they bring notable drawbacks. These include substantial overhead, resulting in larger, less efficient deployments and startup times, and a dependency on the underlying OS for security, posing potential vulnerabilities. This scenario necessitates a more efficient, secure, and universally adaptable deployment method. WebAssembly (Wasm) addresses these challenges, and this talk will introduce the open-source project Boxer, which offers tooling for taking existing containerized workloads and definitions, and creating near-universally deployable Wasm distributions (“Boxes”) offering roughly the same environment, with all the benefits of the WebAssembly target. Wasm, a compact binary instruction format, enables lightweight, sandboxed execution, significantly reducing overhead compared to traditional containers. This leads to enhanced performance and smaller, more efficient deployments, ideal for cloud computing. Additionally, Wasm’s memory-safe, isolated execution environment provides superior security, independent of the OS. Thus, Wasm, with its blend of efficiency and security, emerges as not just an alternative, but a substantial improvement over container technology for cloud deployments. This talk will critically examine this new technology, its approach, benefits, and existing limitations compared with containers, and its path forward as a new standard in cloud infrastructure.
Boxer: Smaller, Faster, Safer
Boxer offers a lightweight, secure, and near-universally deployable alternative to traditional containers using WebAssembly.
extism/extism
The framework for building with WebAssembly (wasm). Easily & securely load wasm modules, move data, call functions, and build extensible apps.
extism/extism
The framework for building with WebAssembly (wasm). Easily & securely load wasm modules, move data, call functions, and build extensible apps.
Apptainer - Portable, Reproducible Containers
Apptainer is an open source container platform designed to run complex applications on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way.
WebAssembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
Wasm 2.0 Completed - WebAssembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime
A lightweight sandboxing tool for enforcing filesystem and network restrictions on arbitrary processes at the OS level, without requiring a container.
Wasm 3.0 Completed - WebAssembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications.
A Tale of Three WebAssembly Runtimes
Walking through the implementation of three different WebAssembly runtimes from scratch
Port Lua to Web Environment using WebAssembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable target for…
How eBPF is shaping the future of Linux and platform engineering
When Docker burst onto the scene in 2013, Linux containers seemed like an overnight success. But the evolution to containers—and microservices and Kubernetes—was actually decades in the making, based on kernel primitives in the Linux operating system. Docker used these primitives, namely cgroups and namespaces, as building blocks to create a lightweight, easy-to-use software packaging format. Linux containers had been used by Google and others for many years, but Docker made them easily accessible to mainstream developers.
PVM: Efficient Shadow Paging for Deploying Secure Containers in Cloud-native Environment
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Featherless - Serverless LLM Hosting
Freedom to reliably deploy any open model effortlessly.
fencesandbox/fence
Lightweight, container-free sandbox for running commands with network and filesystem restrictions
Containers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018
A Compiler Author’s Guide to WebAssembly GC by Oscar Spencer @ Wasm I/O 2025