Source URL: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/03/30/0627205/microsoft-announces-hyperlight-wasm-speedy-vm-based-security-at-scale-with-a-webassembly-runtime?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
Source: Slashdot
Title: Microsoft Announces ‘Hyperlight Wasm’: Speedy VM-Based Security at Scale with a WebAssembly Runtime
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Summary: The text discusses the innovative Hyperlight open-source Rust library developed by Microsoft’s Azure Core Upstream team, designed to execute functions quickly and securely within virtual machines (VMs). This new approach enhances performance by simplifying the virtual machine model and enabling a wide range of programming languages to run efficiently, while also addressing security through the integration of a WebAssembly (wasm) runtime.
Detailed Description: The content highlights significant advancements in cloud computing and virtualization technology, particularly related to Microsoft Azure’s Hyperlight library. Here are the key points:
– **Performance Improvement**: Hyperlight allows for rapid function execution in a virtual machine environment by minimizing the overhead typically associated with traditional VMs, which often require full operating systems and multiple virtual devices. Hyperlight simplifies this by solely exposing memory and CPU resources to the VM guests.
– **WebAssembly Integration**: By building on a WebAssembly runtime (wasmtime), Hyperlight can run workloads from various programming languages—both compiled (C, Go, Rust) and interpreted (Python, JavaScript, C#)—within its micro-VM architecture. This allows developers to compile their applications without needing specific knowledge of Hyperlight.
– **Security Enhancements**: The architecture ensures double security through wasmtime’s robust software-defined runtime sandboxing, which operates within Hyperlight’s VM, protecting workloads and potentially reducing attack surfaces.
– **CNCF Sandbox Inclusion**: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has recognized Hyperlight as an early-stage project by onboarding it into their Sandbox program, showcasing its potential and fostering community support.
– **Future Enhancements**: Hyperlight has ambitious goals for further performance improvements, with the aim of reducing the VM creation time to below one millisecond.
– **User Experience**: End-users will benefit from a seamless experience, as the Hyperlight micro-VM operates transparently within Azure, with little need for developers to concern themselves with the underlying infrastructure.
Through these innovations, the Hyperlight library represents a significant step forward in cloud computing security and infrastructure efficiency, making it highly relevant to security and compliance professionals in the industry.