Wasm 101 with Linkerd

Thursday, June 19, 2025

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

WebAssembly - Wasm - has been around since 2017. Though it got its start in browsers (as its name implies), it's made incredible inroads in the cloud-native world due to its portability and performance — so let's take a look at what WASM in our world looks like and what it can do, with special guest Bailey Hayes, CTO at Cosmonic, the creators of wasmCloud.

We'll take a deep dive into what Wasm is, how it works, why you should care, and why tools like wasmCloud matter in this world, finishing up with a live demo of how we can use Linkerd to bridge Wasm workloads safely into our Kubernetes application. Join us for this educational hands-on session, and get answers to all your WASM questions!

What you'll get out of this

Learn what WASM is and what it can (and can't!) do
Understand how to separate Wasm facts from Wasm hype
Find out how Wasm fits into the broader cloud-native world

Getting Ready

This is a hands-on workshop, so it's important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster (pretty much any kind will do!) and the Linkerd CLI installed on your machine! We'll use BEL 2.18, but edge releases starting with edge-25.4.4. will work just fine, too. Check out the BEL Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (If you don't want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won't be as fun!)

Speakers

Bailey Hayes

CTO at Cosmonic

Bailey Hayes is the CTO at Cosmonic, WASI Subgroup co-chair, and Technical Steering Committee director of the Bytecode Alliance. She believes the future is in distributed systems and WebAssembly (Wasm). Her daily activities include wrangling microservices, finding new tools for better devx, and discovering the best food for any given location. She is a lifetime NC native and lives with her partner and two high energy dogs in Cary, NC.

Flynn

Tech Evangelist

Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.