8 Principles of Secure Platform Engineering with WebAssembly

Cosmonic Control provides the missing layer of secure containment and operational consistency for AI-native workloads. It allows you to integrate sandboxed MCP servers directly into your existing Kubernetes platforms—across any cloud, on-premises infrastructure, or the edge—without rearchitecting your environment. Built on CNCF wasmCloud, Cosmonic Control enables teams to leverage existing pipelines, ingress/egress controls, and observability stacks while maintaining strict isolation and least-privilege execution for every agentic component.

With Cosmonic Control, enterprises can deploy faster—with a safety net. It transforms AI workflows from experimental prototypes into auditable, policy-driven, and production-ready systems, giving you confidence that your platform can safely harness the power of agentic AI without sacrificing control.

Shift Down

Shifting down is about moving capabilities out of application templates and into the platform itself— providing developers with higher-level abstractions that eliminate the need for deep domain knowledge of the underlying infrastructure, so they can focus purely on delivering business logic. Shifting down emphasizes building platforms that internalize complexity, enforce consistency, and expose simple, secure interfaces that become platform guarantees and features so that developers can consume services without needing to understand the machinery beneath.

Secure by Design

Security in modern platform engineering must be built in, not bolted on. By applying defense in depth, every layer of the platform can apply a zero-trust security philosophy. A default-deny, explicit-allow model, combined with least privilege everywhere, ensures that no system or user gains more access than required. Harden the platform itself, not just the pipeline, and continuously trust, but verify with guardrails at every layer.

Minimal Footprint

A smaller footprint means a smaller attack surface. Platform engineering architects should ensure that every artifact contains only the code and dependencies absolutely necessary to run. This reduces vulnerabilities, simplifies patching, and lowers operational overhead. Minimalism in templates and artifacts also accelerates onboarding and improves long-term maintainability.

Shift Left

Shift security, compliance, and reliability into the earliest phases of the software lifecycle. Enterprises have already invested heavily in source code management, artifact scanning, storage, and deployment policies—extending these practices earlier reduces risk at scale.

Operate with Guardrails

Standardized operational guardrails enforce security, compliance, and reliability across environments. These controls reduce cognitive load for developers and create consistency across teams.

Platform of Platforms

Enterprise platform teams increasingly operate as platforms of platforms, integrating security, messaging, databases, and other enterprise services, often maintained by other peer platform teams. These integrations must be modular and secure, often expressed as abstractions that span organizational boundaries. Architects need to design platforms that can extend capabilities while preserving strong isolation and consistency across domains.

Immutable, Declarative, and Reliable Infra

For consistency and security, infrastructure should be immutable and declarative—qualities that are facilitated by deploying CNCF wasmCloud hosts as Kubernetes resources. Furthermore, enterprise platforms must expect failure and design for recovery. Reliability comes from redundancy—duplicating deployments across availability zones, regions, and even clouds. While this incurs the high cost of idle infrastructure, it is essential to meet SLAs (service-level agreements) and SLOs (service-level objectives) that define uptime guarantees and reliability targets. Auto-healing systems that detect and recover from failures are critical for maintaining user trust and platform resilience.

Continuous Verification and Observability

Feedback loops are the nervous system of a secure platform. Continuous monitoring, alerting, and observability provide insights needed to react to anomalies as they occur. Real-time data drives autoscaling, load balancing, and adaptive policies, ensuring platforms not only respond to failures but anticipate and prevent cascading issues.

How is WebAssembly Security different from containers or VMs?

Wasm uses a capability-based security model. Code runs with zero default privileges and can only call APIs you explicitly expose. Unlike containers, which assume a full Linux kernel and then try to bolt on seccomp/AppArmor, Wasm starts at zero and adds just what’s needed — dramatically shrinking the attack surface.

Why does “scale to zero” matter for Platform Engineering and MCP?

Servers, such as MCP, are often idle until they are called - for example, an AI agent may only use them periodically. Wasm components can start in milliseconds and consume almost no resources when idle. That means you can run hundreds or thousands of isolated MCPs without paying a container tax or keeping dormant pods alive.

How does Wasm portability help my enterprise architecture?

Wasm runs the same binary anywhere: dev laptops, edge gateways, or multi-cloud clusters. This eliminates drift between environments and makes MCP extensions easy to move, test, and redeploy without re-platforming.

Can I leverage my existing Kubernetes investments?

Cosmonic extends Kubernetes with a control plane for Wasm components. You keep your existing K8s infrastructure — networking, monitoring, RBAC — but gain a secure, lightweight substrate to run MCP sandboxes side by side with containers. This lets platform teams build better together: reuse K8s governance and observability while introducing Wasm’s speed and safety for AI-driven workloads.

How does this approach future-proof my AI/agent strategy?

As MCP adoption grows, so will the need to run untrusted or partner-supplied servers safely. Wasm provides a stable, forward-compatible sandbox model that works across clouds and chips, while Cosmonic keeps the operational model aligned with Kubernetes and cloud-native tooling you already own.

Where does this run — cloud or on-premises?

Anywhere you already run Kubernetes. WebAssembly sandboxes work on all major K8s distributions — including Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, Rancher, Canonical Charmed K8s, SUSE NeuVector, and upstream open-source Kubernetes.

Cosmonic’s control plane layers on top, so you can run MCP sandboxes in the cloud, on-prem, or hybrid without changing your cluster strategy. If it’s Kubernetes, it works.

Shift Down with Cosmonic Control