Leveraging WASM to Improve Quality and Flexibility of the API Plugin Ecosystem... - Rohan Deshpande
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 11/09/2023

Leveraging WASM to Improve Quality and Flexibility of the API Plugin Ecosystem at Goldman Sachs - Rohan Deshpande, Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs provides an API platform to provision, mediate, secure, and manage APIs at scale both on-premise and on the Cloud. Web Assembly (WASM) is used heavily “beyond the browser” to cater to custom functionality of the tenants on the platform. These are written as custom filters. Writing these filters in WASM code allowed us to adhere to the firmwide SDLC and subject the filters to the same quality and governance checks as regular software. It also gave customers the ability to use standard languages like Java and Go to implement plugins. Rich set of functionality built using WASM include (1) Token conversion to provide interoperability between applications running different token managers (2) Claim extraction from JWT tokens to appropriately invoke upstream endpoints (3) Custom health checks (4) Custom maintenance pages (5) Request validation. In this session, we'll describe our journey to WASM-based filters and how we implemented some of them.