Server-Side WebAssembly

Building portable and secure multi-language apps

Danilo Chiarlone

• Publisher: Manning
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9781638357896
• Subtopic: Cloud Computing
• Index: Computer Science

“WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing.”
–Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker

Server-Side WebAssembly shows you how to harness the power of Wasm on the application back-end. By following the numerous practical examples and crystal-clear explanations, you’ll soon be seeing the benefits of reduced cold start times, improved security and performance, and the freedom of polyglot programming.

Inside Server-Side WebAssembly you’ll learn how to:

• Develop and deploy server-side Wasm applications
• Create and manage Wasm containers with OCI
• Compile Wasm components from multiple languages
• Scale Wasm applications using Kubernetes
• Implement Wasm for edge computing scenarios
• Integrate with cloud resources and machine learning

WebAssembly empowers developers to run almost any language on the web—including high performance tools like C or C++. Server-Side WebAssembly lays out everything you need to take WebAssembly beyond its traditional browser domain. You’ll learn from WebAssembly expert and contributor Danilo Chiarlone, who has packed the book with production-level examples based on his experience working with WebAssembly at Microsoft.

About the book

Server-Side WebAssembly is a comprehensive guide to using WebAssembly for microservices, serverless or edge computing, DevOps, and more. You’ll start with the underlying fundamentals of WebAssembly and quickly move on to developing production-grade apps. Throughout the book, you’ll work on a project utilizing a Key-Value store component, an HTTP component, and even a machine learning component. Along the way, you’ll see how easy WebAssembly makes it to share your apps with the world using containers and scalable Kubernetes integration.

About the reader

This book is aimed at developers and tech professionals from across all disciplines, including DevOps engineers, backend developers, and systems architects. You’ll find code samples in Rust, JavaScript and Python, but no specific language specialty is required.

About the author

Danilo Chiarlone is a champion of multiple WebAssembly System Interface Proposals, and has made significant contributions to WebAssembly with his work on projects like SpiderLightning and runwasi. Danilo is also a passionate educator, offering free lessons on Rust and WebAssembly through his YouTube channel and delivering multiple presentations at events such as CloudNative Rejekts, WasmCon, and RustGlobal. Danilo works at Microsoft, where he focuses on increasing WebAssembly security through hardware virtualization and enabling the next wave of serverless and edge computing applications.

Table of contents

• Server-Side WebAssembly
• copyright
• contents
• dedication
• foreword
• preface
• acknowledgments
• about this book
• about the author
• about the cover illustration
• Part 1 WebAssembly for architects
• 1 Introducing Wasm on the server
• 2 Building server-side applications with Wasm modules
• 3 Enhancing portability and security with Wasm components
• 4 Interfacing Wasm with the underlying system
• 5 From machine learning to databases: Applications of Wasm
• Part 2 WebAssembly for developers
• 6 Creating production-grade Wasm applications
• 7 Introducing Wasm containers
• 8 Scalability for Wasm with Kubernetes
• 9 The future of Wasm
• appendix A  Required tools
• appendix B  Deploying the SmartCMS to Azure Kubernetes Service
• afterword