Extending the Mesh with Wasm

WebAssembly (Wasm) is the future of cloud-native infrastructure extensibility. Wasm provides a safe, secure, and dynamic way of extending infrastructure with the programming language of your choice. While feature-rich service meshes like Istio provide myriad features to help solve problems related to microservice communication, organizations inevitably find themselves needing custom solutions tailored specifically to their individual constraints. Gloo Mesh Enterprise packages all the tooling you need to develop, publish, and deploy the Wasm extensions your business needs to meet its unique service mesh requirements.

With the Gloo Mesh Enterprise CLI, you can initialize, build, and push proprietary Wasm filters. Choose your preferred programming language (currently C++, Rust, Go, and AssemblyScript are supported) and we’ll generate all the source code you need to get started implementing custom mesh behavior. To publish your work use the build and push commands. These will compile your Wasm module and make it available via webassemblyhub.io or the OCI registry of your choice.

To add your new Wasm filter to the mesh, all you need is a WasmDeployment Kubernetes custom resource. Specify which Workloads should be configured and with which Wasm filters, then let Gloo Mesh handle the rest. A Gloo Mesh Enterprise extension server will watch for WasmDeployments and manage the lifecycle of all your Wasm filters accordingly.

Next Steps

You can check out our deployment guide to try out the WASM extension. To learn more about Wasm and Gloo Mesh Enterprise, request a demo at solo.io.