Guest: Steve Manuel (LinkedIn)
Company: Dylibso (Twitter)

Officially launched in August 2022, Dylibso is a team of engineers working on bringing more maturity and better developer tools to the WebAssembly ecosystem. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Steve Manuel, Co-founder and CEO at Dylibso, to talk about how the company is helping companies take WebAssembly to production.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• WebAssembly binaries are smaller in many cases than a container. This allows you to pack more compute or functionality into the same number of resources that you might use for a pod running containers in Kubernetes.
• WebAssembly in the cloud that brings costs down, offers operational simplicity, and provides developers with a better experience overall, when it contrasts with a complex system like Kubernetes.
• Dylibso started with an open-source project called Extism, a universal plug-in system that allows you to run WebAssembly extensions inside your app.
• The company recently announced another product, Modsurfer, a first-of-its-kind suite of observability, security, and monitoring analysis tools that acts as a system of record for all of your WebAssembly code. For developers using it locally on their machine, it’s completely free. The enterprise version can be deployed inside your own infrastructure to put into the pipeline or to track production in real-time.
• The value of open source: 1) A lot of retooling is very sensitive to the kind of the lower-level-code integrations that teams may be working with. From a security standpoint, it is important to see the source code that is being tightly integrated into the rest of your application. 2) It gives small companies like Dylibso a platform to distribute software in a very efficient way, no sales or order-taking involved.
• What’s ahead for WebAssembly: It provides a consistent interface, a consistent architecture, so that depending on the compute at hand, some of that code can be distributed across the cloud. The code can be on the edge and the code can be on the browser, but it’s all compiled in the same format. Instead of having to wrangle together JavaScript code for the browser, Docker containers for the cloud, and stitch together a complex architecture, you could potentially have one unit of compute as WebAssembly and it distributes across a plethora of different targets, cloud edge, browser, IoT, etc.
• What’s ahead for Dylibso: The company will be focusing on bringing tools that are agnostic to different use cases or runtime environments. It is particularly eager to work on generic observability tools that will give more insight into what’s actually happening in the WebAssembly code, as it’s executing or offline.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.