History
Origin
wasmCloud was started by Liam Randall and Kevin Hoffman while they worked at a large US bank. They wanted to run business logic as small, portable units that the platform could place and connect, rather than as monoliths bound to a single runtime. The early abstraction drew on the actor model (which dates to 1973). The implementation moved from Rust to Erlang/OTP for a period, and then returned to Rust once the WebAssembly Component Model made a Rust-based component runtime practical (b-nova, InfoWorld).
The project is sponsored by Cosmonic, co-founded by Liam Randall and Stuart Harris. The current project lead is Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic CTO and a member of the Bytecode Alliance TSC (CNCF incubator blog).
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2021-07-13 (CNCF project page) |
| 2023 | Ecosystem componentized for WASI Preview 2 / Component Model; WIT adopted as the IDL (Cosmonic) |
| 2024 | wasmCloud 1.0 at KubeCon EU Paris, bringing WASI 0.2 and wRPC to production use (Cosmonic) |
| 2024 | Kubernetes operator (formerly Cosmonic Connect Kubernetes) donated to CNCF (Cosmonic) |
| 2024 | Promoted from Sandbox to Incubating by TOC vote on 2024-11-08 (CNCF) |
| 2026 | v2.4.0 released on 2026-06-17 (GitHub Releases) |
How it evolved
The largest shift is the v2 rewrite reflected at the pinned commit. Historically wasmCloud was a multi-crate system organised around a NATS "lattice" connecting actors (later components), capability providers, and the wadm declarative deployment manager (wasmCloud docs). The wasmCloud/wasmCloud repository at the pinned commit is substantially different. It centres on wash (README.md:1) and a Cargo workspace of three members: the wash CLI, the wash-runtime runtime, and a benchmark crate.
This tracks the Q3 2025 roadmap, which set out to reframe providers as wRPC servers and to rework transport, scheduling, events, and claims while leaning into Kubernetes (roadmap). In the v2 code the NATS lattice is no longer the control plane. Control flows over gRPC to a Kubernetes operator (proto/wasmcloud/runtime/v2/). NATS remains a dependency used by some capability plugins (key-value and blob store), not a required control-plane element.
Two consequences follow for readers. Older write-ups describing lattice, NATS, actors, and wadm are still useful for the conceptual model, but they do not match the current code layout. The architecture and internals sections here describe the v2 code as it exists at 0c6315b.
Where it stands now
The project is CNCF Incubating. Releases continue on the v2.x line, with v2.4.0 dated 2026-06-17. Development centres on the wash CLI and the embedded wash-runtime, with the Go operator and gateway providing the Kubernetes integration. The stated direction is a single component runtime shared between local development (wash dev) and Kubernetes production (operator plus gRPC), as captured in the roadmap and realised in the v2 workspace (roadmap).