Universal Microservices Architecture: Device-Independent Modeling for Distributed Systems Using WebAssembly

Modern software development is increasingly fragmented across platforms, runtimes, and teams. Developers are forced to duplicate business logic across web, mobile, and server environments, creating inconsistent experiences, wasted effort, and brittle systems that are hard to scale. In the context of these very real issues, this book will introduce you to Universal Microservices Architecture (UMA), a new, portable, and runtime-agnostic architecture using WebAssembly, that does not bind business logic to a specific stack and enables you to build highly modular, scalable, and efficient applications that work seamlessly across environments.

Through this book you will understand the principles and building blocks of Universal Microservices Architecture (UMA), and how it differs from traditional monoliths, microservices, and frontend/backend paradigms and learn how to architect enterprise applications using WebAssembly and UMA. You will gain expertise in the portable logic and role of WebAssembly and learn how to structure, compile, and version portable business logic. The book will also help you dive into transport layers and message contracts for remote service execution and cover the operational patterns and tooling needed for building and deploying UMA-based applications. Additionally, it will teach you to address the security concerns and enforcement boundaries across distributed runtimes. Finally, to understand the full scale of UMA the book will enable you to explore applied examples of UMA across domains and platforms.

This book is an invaluable guide to an architectural model that decouples software from platform constraints, enabling truly portable, sandboxed microservices powered by WebAssembly and offers a practical, forward-looking guide for architects seeking to scale client-side applications, unify teams, and prepare for AI-generated workflows using modular, testable service components.

What You Will Learn

• How to architect enterprise applications that are portable, modular, and runtime-agnostic using WebAssembly and UMA.
• How to decouple application logic from platform-specific dependencies
• Master strategies for managing, versioning, and orchestrating a large set of distributed microservices across client, edge, and server environments.
• Scale client-side applications and prepare for AI-generated workflows using modular, testable service components

Enrico Piovesanis a software architect at Autodesk with over 20 years of experience designing distributed, event-driven, and modular systems across cloud, edge, and client environments. His work has focused on scalability, performance, developer experience, and long-term system design.

Over the past few years, he has been working on new architectural models focused on portability, contracts, and runtime-independent execution.

Before that, he co-founded startups in education, travel, and payments, focusing on turning new ideas into working systems. He is passionate about system design, platform thinking, team autonomy, and architecture that evolves with scale.