September 17, 2025

Agenda

DEMO + DISCUSSION: wasmCloud crate consolidation
DISCUSSION: A view of the new wasmCloud + wash crates in wasmCloud architecture diagrams
DISCUSSION: wasmCloud "next"

Brooks presented plans for the radical simplification of APIs and architecture, and a consolidation of crates in support of that goal. He covered his PR introducing the new wasmcloud crate.
The wasmcloud crate consolidates host, runtime, and core libraries into a single crate
The new crate aims to...
- Introduce a simplified Host API focused on scheduling "workloads" (collections of components with configuration)
- Replace built-in capability providers with host plugins for easier extension
- Make the wRPC layer optional and plugin-based
- Support in-process component-to-component calls for components running on the same host
Benefits and improvements from the new approach include...
- Simpler API surface for deploying and managing components
- No requirement to run NATS for local development
- Host plugins enable extending wasmCloud without modifying core code
- Performance improvements through direct component-to-component calls
- Better separation of concerns: wasmCloud focuses on being the best WebAssembly application runtime
- Still maintains OCI-based component distribution

Eric has a PR up creating a "next" version of docs along with initial documentation for Wasm Shell, the next generation of wash
Documentation will be iteratively updated to reflect the new architecture
New system context and application service diagrams created to explain the architecture
Community Excalidraw library being used and expanded for architecture diagrams