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Session + Live Q&A

Better Serverless Computing With WebAssembly

About 10 years ago Fastly was founded with the goal of bringing developer's applications as close to users as possible.

In this talk you'll see why WebAssembly is the next big step on our journey to computing at the edge. Learn about our edge computing platform, Compute@Edge, and upcoming developments in the WASM ecosystem such as WASI and the Component Model.

Main Takeaways

1 Hear about WebAssembly and Compute@Edge, some of the features, what it does and how it does it.

2 Learn about using WebAssembly with Compute@Edge in cloud edge computing.


What's the focus of your work these days?

The focus of my work is helping customers at Fastly adopt WebAssembly and serverless in general, whether that's from moving monolithic applications into microservices and serverless applications, or whether it's adopting new technologies like WebAssembly or figuring out how they can benefit from edge computing. What Fastly is working on is an edge cloud where you can get even closer to the users. So it's a new emerging technology. A lot of people have never worked with edge computing or serverless, so it's a lot of evangelizing.

What is the motivation behind your talk?

To get people excited about WebAssembly. There's been a lot of exciting specifications and new technologies around the WebAssembly ecosystem, but lack in real world wins. What I'd like to do is share why Fastly believes in WebAssembly, some of the exciting things we've been doing and have achieved and have in production, but then also theorize about the future. Look at things that we know are coming in the specs and then come up with ideas on what we can build with this.

How would you describe the persona and level of the target audience that attends this session?

I think it is really mixed. In my session, I assume that they will have an idea of what WebAssembly is, but by no means experts. I plan to do some intro, talk about WebAssembly and then also talk about things that are on a deeper level as well. But I'll probably lead into those. So I think generally people who are interested in the technology.

What would you like those that attend your session to walk away with?

Hype, that's really what this is about. There are loads of fantastic talks about the cool, deep down technical details of WebAssembly. And whilst I'll include some of those, this is really about using WebAssembly for real.


Speaker

William Overton

Senior Serverless Solutions Architect @Fastly

 William Overton is a Senior Serverless Solutions Architect at Fastly where we're working on the future of edge computing. His main focuses are helping customers adopt (and get excited about) WebAssembly and Serverless Computing. In his spare time Will likes trying out new technologies...

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Date

Thursday May 12 / 12:20PM EDT (50 minutes)

Track

WebAssembly & Modern Systems Programming Languages

Topics

WebAssemblyRustServerlessProgramming Languages

Slides

Slides are not available

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