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wasmCloud Q1 Roadmap, WASI Preview 3 & the Wasm Component Model

The March 26, 2025 wasmCloud community call is the last of the quarter, so Brooks Townsend walks the Q1 roadmap end to end — what shipped, what's in flight, and what slipped — with the Wasm component model and WASI Preview 3 dominating where maintainer time went. Open-source benchmarking Helm charts and a combined wash CLI/lib landed; a cron-job provider, logging-buffer error counts, and bundling are in progress; and a big chunk of the team's effort went upstream into Wasmtime and JCO to push WASI P3 across the line. The call closes with a look ahead to WASM I/O Barcelona and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in London.

Key Takeaways​

  • This was the final call of Q1, and quarterly roadmap planning for Q2 was pushed to the week after KubeCon EU so maintainers could focus on conference talks and demos
  • Completed roadmap items included open-sourcing the benchmarking Helm charts (so you can profile and benchmark wasmCloud apps reliably), combining the wash CLI and lib to remove release friction, secrets/KV improvements, CI changes to only build providers and the host when needed, and conventional-commit-driven release notes
  • In-progress work spans emitting an error count when the tracing buffer is full (PR open), a cron-job provider (open PR, multiple community designs to reconcile), bundling wasmCloud and wash, clap autocomplete, and a built-in HTTP client capability provider
  • Much of the quarter's maintainer energy went upstream into the Wasm component model: Roman is implementing async/WASI P3 interfaces (including WASI HTTP) in Wasmtime, alongside contributions from Alex Crichton, Joel Dice, and Luke Wagner
  • Victor Adossi is driving JCO and the broader JavaScript component-model ecosystem forward, with significant WASI P3 work landing
  • The wasmCloud Dev stats instance (provided by the CNCF) showed 335 PRs merged over the quarter — just under four a day — with steadily climbing contributors and contributions
  • Victor encouraged the community to keep filing usability and docs issues while building — those "sharp edges" are some of the maintainers' favorite issues to receive
  • A deferred wasi-config discussion was bumped again to the post-conference Q2 roadmap session, since Taylor and others needed to weigh in

Chapters​

Meeting Notes​

Q1 Roadmap Review: What Shipped​

Because this was the last call of the quarter, Brooks devoted most of it to reviewing the Q1 roadmap. He framed it honestly: the team planned an ambitious roadmap, and operating at the bleeding edge of WebAssembly means constantly adapting to and helping implement upstream work, so not everything lands as scoped. Even so, a solid chunk of completed items came through:

  • Open-sourcing the benchmarking Helm charts, so you can profile and benchmark your wasmCloud applications in a reliable, repeatable way
  • Combining the wash CLI and lib, removing a point of friction in releases that had been tripping up the team (thanks to Ahmed)
  • Releasing secrets, KV, and CI improvements from Taylor and Roman — including CI changes to only build providers and the host when needed
  • Documentation and release-notes improvements, using conventional commits to generate clean, markdown-structured release notes for wasmCloud and wash, with breaking changes surfaced at the top

In-Progress Work​

Brooks then walked the in-progress cards — items started, some with PRs open:

  • Emitting an error count when the logging buffer is full — a tracing change so that when the internal Rust event buffer overflows, the host surfaces a count rather than silently dropping (and never blocks a component on tracing). PR open thanks to Rob Marvin.
  • A cron-job capability provider — De opened a PR, and several community members have independently designed cron providers, so the work is partly about collaborating on the right design. Aditya, a wasmCloud maintainer, flagged it as a personally busy period (a healthy reminder that open-source contributors can't always spend work time on it).
  • Bundling wasmCloud and wash — proven possible, just needs prioritization; Brooks expected to hack on it during conference downtime.
  • clap autocomplete and a built-in HTTP client capability provider (Dude planning a draft PR), both close to the line.
  • An SBOM / build-provenance RFC investigated by Masood, whose preliminary conclusion was that it would further complicate CI without much tangible benefit right now — worth a fuller discussion on a future call.

WASI Preview 3, Wasmtime, and JCO​

The biggest card on the roadmap was WASI Preview 3 tracking, and Brooks was clear that a lot of maintainer effort flowed upstream into the Wasm component model rather than into wasmCloud-specific tasks — which is exactly why some roadmap items slipped. He called out Roman, who has been implementing async versions of interfaces and the P3 variations (including WASI HTTP) directly in Wasmtime, alongside contributions from Alex Crichton, Joel Dice (Fermyon), and Luke Wagner. On the JavaScript side, Victor Adossi is pushing JCO and the wider JS ecosystem forward with a ton of P3 work. Getting Preview 3 out, Brooks noted, is an important enough task to justify the slippage.

Community Contributions and Dev Stats​

Victor reminded everyone watching that filing usability issues and docs gaps while building is genuinely valuable — those are some of the maintainers' favorite issues, because they expose the sharp edges that make the project easier to use. Brooks then opened the wasmCloud Dev stats instance (provided by the CNCF) and highlighted 335 PRs merged over the quarter — just under four per day — with contributor and contribution counts steadily climbing. It's a clear signal that even when the roadmap doesn't fully empty out, the community is shipping at a strong, sustained pace.

Looking Ahead: WASM I/O and KubeCon EU​

With WASM I/O in Barcelona the next day and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU (plus QCon) in London the following week, Brooks ran through the wasmCloud presence:

  • WASM I/O (Barcelona): Bailey Hayes and Liam Randall presenting; a Couchbase workshop featuring wasmCloud
  • KubeCon EU / QCon (London): Taylor's lightning talk with TAG Runtime; Jonas on Linkerd, WebAssembly, and containers; Taylor and David Justice (Microsoft) on "Was Am I Right, or Was Am I Wrong? An Overview of the Wasm Ecosystem"; Brooks' own "Wasm Whiplash: wasmCloud's Wild Ride to Standards" (a five-year retrospective); Colin Murphy on SPIFFE in practice for WebAssembly workloads (workload identity); and Liam on "Can You Maintain 1,000 Apps? wasmCloud and Kubernetes" in the platform engineering track

Because most maintainers will be at the conference, Q2 roadmap planning was deferred to the week after KubeCon, and the rolled-over wasi-config discussion was bumped again so Taylor and Jonas can weigh in. ossfellow, who has done substantial investigation on that wasi-config issue — running jobs, gathering logs, outputs, reports, and attestations — agreed it's best discussed during Q2 planning when the team decides what to take on next.

WebAssembly News and Updates​

The throughline of this call is upstream momentum on WASI Preview 3 and the Wasm component model. wasmCloud maintainers are pouring effort into Wasmtime — Roman implementing async/P3 interfaces and WASI HTTP — and into JCO for the JavaScript side, with contributions from Alex Crichton, Joel Dice, and Luke Wagner across the Bytecode Alliance. The week's WebAssembly calendar is stacked too: WASM I/O in Barcelona and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in London, where the wasmCloud community is delivering talks spanning standards, workload identity (SPIFFE), the Wasm ecosystem, and running 1,000 apps on Kubernetes. For ongoing updates, follow the Bytecode Alliance and the WASI subgroup, and watch the wasmCloud blog.

What is wasmCloud?​

wasmCloud is a CNCF project that lets you build applications using WebAssembly components and deploy them anywhere — cloud, edge, or Kubernetes clusters. It uses the WebAssembly component model to let you write business logic in any supported language (Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript, C#, and more) while the platform handles capabilities like HTTP, messaging, and key-value storage through a pluggable provider architecture. wasmCloud's host is built on Wasmtime and distributes workloads as OCI artifacts over NATS. With built-in OpenTelemetry observability and Kubernetes integration, wasmCloud bridges WebAssembly's portable, sandboxed execution model and production cloud-native infrastructure.

Topic Deep Dive: The Wasm Component Model​

The reason this roadmap review skews so heavily upstream is the Wasm component model and its next major milestone, WASI Preview 3. Preview 3 adds native async, streams, and futures to the component model — async versions of interfaces like WASI HTTP — and getting it landed requires implementation work in Wasmtime (Roman and others) and in the JavaScript toolchain via JCO (Victor and the wider ecosystem). wasmCloud's bet is that the component model becomes the universal contract: write a component once in any language, expose typed interfaces (WIT/WASI), and run it on any host. That's why maintainers prioritize upstream component-model and P3 work even when it means a few wasmCloud-specific roadmap cards slide — the standard is the foundation everything else builds on. To go deeper, see the component model documentation, the wasmCloud overview, and our blog post on WASI Preview 3 on wasmCloud.

Who Should Watch This​

This call is especially valuable for contributors and maintainers who want to understand where wasmCloud's roadmap stands and where the best on-ramps are (the ready-for-work issues discussed at 16:39 are a great place to start), WebAssembly ecosystem watchers tracking WASI Preview 3 progress in Wasmtime and JCO (the upstream callouts at 11:00 and 12:33), and anyone attending WASM I/O or KubeCon EU who wants to find the wasmCloud talks and meet the team in person (the conference rundown at 21:40).

Up Next​

The next community call was set to be a short check-in from the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU conference floor in London, with full Q2 roadmap planning deferred to the week after the conference. Watch for the deferred wasi-config discussion to be revisited as part of that planning, continued WASI Preview 3 progress, and the in-progress cron-job provider, logging-buffer, and bundling work moving toward completion.

Get Involved​

wasmCloud is a CNCF project and contributions are welcome. Join the community:

Full Transcript​

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