I am interested in wasmEdge(webassembly) and trying to understand it. I looked all over google, but didn't find the answer to is wasmEdge is truly containerless. I believe it still uses containers CRI-o crun or containerd, but why people claim it to be containerless. Is there any wasm runtime that is truly working with containerless serverless clouds? Please let me know.
Regards
WebAssembly runtimes, including WasmEdge, are all secure sandboxes that can isolate and run applications. They are definitely "containers". In fact, one might argue that they are much safer containers than regular Linux containers (LXCs).
You can run applications in WasmEdge through a simple command line in an operating system process.
https://wasmedge.org/book/en/quick_start/run_cli.html
Now, it is common to run WasmEdge applications inside "container management tools", such as crun, containerd, cri-o, kubernetes, and more recently Docker Desktop and Docker CLI.
However, the reason is simply to provide a better experience for developers and ops who are already familiar with container tools. In the example of Docker Desktop, it uses runc to start Linux containers and uses WasmEdge to execute Wasm apps. As Solomon Hykes puts it eloquently, the idea is to run and manage Linux containers and Wasm "containers" side-by-side in the same network with a single set of tools.
Some of the confusion might be because wasmEdge can be deployed in multiple ways. In the general case, it is not running in a container and is part of an application (see Integrations.) But for maximum compatibility with existing Cloud Native tools, it can be managed like a container. For example, by distributing Wasm modules as OCI images, they can be stored in a container registry, started by CRI-O, etc. but it isn't using a container for isolation. See this post for more on being managed like a container. This infographic might also be helpful explaining the differences.
