Containers have become the established interface between your software and the platform you run on. Having a standardized interface, helps increase productivity in getting new software deployed. However, containers is a fairly low-level interface, where things like processing architectures, and operating systems are part of it.

WebAssembly is a platform neutral compilation target. With the introduction of the component model, the interface between your platform and software, is no longer tied to operating systems, and processing architectures (though container runtimes), but can include a much higher-level abstraction, e.g., an HTTP request/response platform.

This is not too different than working with platforms like AWS Lambda, or Azure Functions, but because of WebAssembly and components, you get to choose freely between the programming language you want to use, when writing the software to run on those platforms.

This talk covers what the component model is, how it works and how you can get started with it to increase your flexibility and productivity as a developer.