WebAssembly is enjoying a lot of hype and momentum right now, but most of it is focused around what it can do for end users and browser-based applications. There's more to WebAssembly than just the web, and in this talk I will go through a number of ideal use cases for WebAssembly on the back-end, running in the cloud.

I'll demonstrate some code for how to load, execute, and verify the provenance of WebAssembly modules in a cloud environment. I'll show various places where you might swap in WebAssembly in environments like Kubernetes or OpenFaaS.

I'll compare and contrast traditional "serverless" implementations with the possibilities enabled by WebAssembly and discuss the future of cloud functions and the impact a portable binary format like WebAssembly can have on distributed systems development.