Opening Keynote (Part 5): One More Thing…

CEO & Co-Founder Augusto Marietti closes the opening keynote with one last exciting product announcement — WASMx!

Transcription

Opening Keynote (Part 5): One More Thing…

Speaker1: All right. So as per tradition, we have one more thing. Today we are unveiling something really, really exciting that we’ve been working on for over a year. We are introducing WASMx. WASMx is a new Kong module that allows to bring web assembly standards into Kong, making this incredible technology innovation into our product suite, starting with Kong API Gateway. What WASMx allows us is to extend the Kong platform not only in all the programming languages supported by web assembly, which is a W3C standard, but we can also reuse all the Envoi filters out there and bring them in through Kong by making an expandable platform with limitless opportunity to customize and extend your API services. Let’s see a demo with our principal engineer, Thibault Charbonnier.

Speaker2: Thank you again, Augusto. Ok, now let’s run into a brief demo of what’s next. Here I have two filters written in rest. One of them is an Echo filter, which answers to some traffic, and the other one is a proxy filter, which injects some headers in the response. Let’s compare those proxies, those filters, with cargo because this is rest and insert the compiled WebAssembly bytecode into two prefixes, an Envoi prefix and an engine with WebAssembly prefix. Here I have an Envoi configuration using the V8 runtime and the Echo filter. Let’s start Envoi, which descends on port nine thousand. Ok, here on the bottom right, I am going to make a request and an inspection request, which is going to give me a response with some request properties in the body of the response. Here they are. We can see that this response, those bites were sent by Envoi. Now let’s look at the same request coming from Engine X next with WebAssembly. On the top right here, I have an engine binary which is compiled with the WASMx runtime, and I know how two WebAssembly filters the Echo and proxy filters. Let’s look at our Engine X configuration. Nothing extraordinary. No specific optimization except two filters loaded in the top level wasn’t new block directive and two server blocks nine thousand and nine thousand one, nine thousand one being a proxy server that bounces back to the first server here. Ok, now let’s start Engine X. On the bottom right of my screen, you will see the Engine X logs. These just indicated that both filters were properly loaded and are ready to handle some traffic. So let’s make the same request on the same port, except this time is going to be Engine X answering the request. Here we go. Engine X and WebAssembly today supports proxy WASMx, which itself has support for rest, go, C++ and zig. In the future, we expect all in WebAssembly to eventually run on Engine X next. Thank you. And back to you, Augusto.

Speaker1: Thank you, Thibault. This is the power of WebAssembly coming to Kong for all of you to try it out starting today. So to recap, we got the concept of smart grid. What happened in electricity with all the challenges to make electricity like a smart grid, always reliable, always available. We go home, we turn a switch and it just works. That’s how we have to think about service connectivity. Remember that trend, that big wave is coming at us. If we don’t have the right strategy, the right technology and the right partner, our enterprises will experience their own blackouts. With that, Kong provides new products and project announcements that allow you to move during these transitions and make sure that your smart grid isalways reliable. And we have also heard from Brad on Nasdaq, how he’s building his cloud computing platform for financial data by exposing more and more services from financial crime detections to real time data, powering applications like Robinhood. And we have seen practical customer use cases from Comcast to Vanguard to American Airlines using both mesh and API gateways, or Ingress Controller to really transform their service connectivity game and innovate a much faster pace. So with that, I want to thank all our sponsors, our partners and our community that made Kong possible and Kong Summit possible, and let’s make next year’s summit bigger and better. Thank you. Bye!