DevOps Articles

Solo.io Borrows OCI Spec to Bundle WebAssembly Modules

Following last year’s release of its WebAssembly Hub, Solo.io has released a proposal for a new WebAssembly (WASM) Open Container Initiative (OCI) image specification that it says will “define how to bundle WASM modules as OCI images to make it easy to build, pull, publish, and execute.” Last March, after Google and the Istio team reached out to Solo.io, the company expanded the focus of the WebAssembly Hub to include extending the Envoy proxy-based Istio service mesh, which had also added WASM extensibility.

We knew that we wanted to do something like the Docker experience, and we decided the best way to do this is to take advantage of stuff that already exists, like the OCI spec,” said Solo.io founder and CEO Idit Levine in an interview.

The OCI spec is just very high level, not specific, and we want it to be more specific, because we feel that it will be better for the tooling, because then the tooling can take those metadata and basically say ‘Ahh, this is an Envoy spec!'”

We needed it, this is something that we’re running with our customers in production, this is why we needed it,” said Levine.