WebAssembly - The shift to the edge

The way we build web applications evolved over the decades - from on-prem servers named after your favourite Star Wars characters to autoscaling cloud clusters and serverless functions. Throughout this journey the architecture paradigm shifted towards more distributed model. Whether that’s your CMS, monitoring system or authorisation layer - it’s most likely just an endpoint you exchange data with. At the end of the day, every HTTP request goes through various middleware layers and requires both server- (SSR) and client-side rendering (CSR).

Recently, a new piece of tech appeared on the landscape - WebAssembly. It became 4th official language on the Web (following HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and was initially meant to run in the browser and improve CSR. It quickly turned out that WebAssembly on the server is also a thing and can revolutionise the way we think of web apps.

Some providers like Fastly and Cloudflare adopted WebAssembly and allows you to run custom code at the edge. That opens up completely new possibilities - authentication, personalised content rendering, A/B testing - you name it. Everything as close to end users as possible.

During my talk I’d like to show you what edge computing offers at this stage and how it can be integrated with AEM as a Cloud Service.