WebAssembly Use Cases and Component Model Experiment

For Kubernetes and CNCF Finland meetup (September 7, Nokia HQ)

Transcript

1. State of the Wasm Ecosystem Yerzhan Zhamashev Creating your own components to abstract away application/plugin development from platform engineering.
2. • Finished Digital Systems and Design at Aalto University, currently studying for a master’s in CS. • Building a web service ecosystem for one of the labs at Aalto University. • Looking forward to expand my horizons even further together with people like you. Yerzhan Zhamashev
3. Contents of this presentation • Thesis contents (Theoretical) ◦ What is Wasm/WASI and its relevance ◦ Wasm use cases • Project work (Practical) ◦ Issues when working with Wasm and current workarounds ◦ Which tools can be utilized to build Wasm apps • What awaits next for Wasm?
4. WebAssembly (Wasm) The specification of WebAssembly is maintained by Languages Browser Runtimes
5. Wasm Outside the Browser Host Runtime
6. Selected Literature
7. Use cases of WebAssembly
8. Use cases of WebAssembly 1. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms 2. Application offloading/migration system 3. Hardware resource access control system 4. Application runtime at an operating system level
9. Use cases of WebAssembly 1. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms 2. Application offloading/migration system 3. Hardware resource access control system 4. Application runtime at an operating system level 5. Remote device software debugging 6. Application runtime for trusted execution environments 7. IoT software deployment system 8. On-target intermediary representation compiler/runtime
10. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) Service for developing applications using remotely invokable functions. Based on the representation of Hall and Ramachandran [1] FaaS server Camera Camera Camera imageRec(image)
11. Application offloading/migration System to migrate a snapshot of an application from one host to another, then continue execution from a new place. Based on the representation of Li et al. [7] Cloud server Device Edge device App
12. Hardware resource access control system A system to grant access to an application for utilizing certain hardware resources Access Control Spec Sheet App2 IoT Device Runtime GPS Camera App
13. Application runtime at an operating system level Runtime Operating System Operating System runtime App App
14. Application runtime at an operating system level Runtime Operating System Operating System runtime App App If compiled ahead of time, reintroduces complexity of cross compiling Is it possible to compile Wasm on resource-constrained devices?
15. Project work: making a simple FaaS solution using Wasm The goal is simple: Trigger a Wasm code to process an HTTP request upon receiving it.
16. Problem 1 WASI sockets ABI is not yet integrated into the standard library and compilation toolchains of C/C++ or Rust. (problems related to async, threads, evolving Wasm/WASI specification)
17. Solution WasmEdge runtime (from Second State, CNCF sandbox project) offers Rust standard library network replacements alongside patched versions of popular HTTP libraries that utilize it. Wasmer runtime (from Wasmer.io) forked the WASI repository as WASIX (while it was still in preview 1) and extended it to create their compilation tools that would rely on it.
18. Better Solution Utilize WASI preview 2 and a newly introduced component model for Wasm modules where interfaces can be defined via Wasm Interface Type (WIT).
19. Problem 2 Wasm component model is not yet supported by major Wasm runtimes. (WasmEdge is awaiting for the proposal to be stabilized before implementing support for it, https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge/issues/1877)
20. Solution Use Wasmtime as the Wasm runtime and utilize the tools developed by Bytecode Alliance (wit-bindgen, wit-deps CLI, wasm-tools CLI)
21. WebAssembly Interface Type (WIT)
22. WebAssembly Interface Type (WIT)
23. WebAssembly Interface Type (WIT)
24. Echo example
25. Static Page example
26. Outbound HTTP request example
27. + Promising option for extending the capabilities of the cloud to the network edge + Promising technology for distributing computation across edge devices + Possible to create a common ‘marketplace’ of cross-platform libraries and apps + Can be integrated with existing technologies Opportunities and threats of using WebAssembly
28. - Depends on the ecosystem of tools around Wasm - In early development with limited real-world usage - As more features get supported by Wasm and Wasm runtimes, are interoperability issues to be reintroduced? Opportunities and threats of using WebAssembly
29. Current runtimes Wasmtime
30. • wit-bindgen (generate language specific code to interface with Wasm components) • wit-deps (turn wit interfaces into a package and manage external wit dependencies) • wasm-tools (perform low-level manipulation of Wasm modules) • jco (create JavaScript bindings for Wasm components) • containerd-wasm-shims (containerd shim implementations that can run Wasm/WASI workloads) Current tools you should try to tinker with
31. Promising orchestration systems
32. Organizations and companies to follow
33. Conclusions
35. [1] A. Hall and U. Ramachandran, “An execution model for serverless functions at the edge,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation, Montreal Quebec Canada: ACM, Apr. 2019, pp. 225–236. doi: 10.1145/3302505.3310084. [2] P. K. Gadepalli, S. McBride, G. Peach, L. Cherkasova, and G. Parmer, “Sledge: a Serverless-first, Light-weight Wasm Runtime for the Edge,” in Proceedings of the 21st International Middleware Conference, Delft Netherlands: ACM, Dec. 2020, pp. 265–279. doi: 10.1145/3423211.3425680. [3] M. Tiwary, P. Mishra, S. Jain, and D. Puthal, “Data Aware Web-Assembly Function Placement,” in Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020, Taipei Taiwan: ACM, Apr. 2020, pp. 4–5. doi: 10.1145/3366424.3382670. [4] P. Gackstatter, P. A. Frangoudis, and S. Dustdar, “Pushing Serverless to the Edge with WebAssembly Runtimes,” in 2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid), Taormina, Italy: IEEE, May 2022, pp. 140–149. doi: 10.1109/CCGrid54584.2022.00023. [5] V. Kjorveziroski, S. Filiposka, and A. Mishev, “Evaluating WebAssembly for Orchestrated Deployment of Serverless Functions,” in 2022 30th Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR), Belgrade, Serbia: IEEE, Nov. 2022, pp. 1–4. doi: 10.1109/TELFOR56187.2022.9983733. [6] H.-J. Jeong, C. H. Shin, K. Y. Shin, H.-J. Lee, and S.-M. Moon, “Seamless Offloading of Web App Computations From Mobile Device to Edge Clouds via HTML5 Web Worker Migration,” in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, Santa Cruz CA USA: ACM, Nov. 2019, pp. 38–49. doi: 10.1145/3357223.3362735. [7] B. Li, W. Dong, and Y. Gao, “WiProg: A WebAssembly-based Approach to Integrated IoT Programming,” in IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, Vancouver, BC, Canada: IEEE, May 2021, pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488424. [8] M. Nurul-Hoque and K. A. Harras, “Nomad: Cross-Platform Computational Offloading and Migration in Femtoclouds Using WebAssembly,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), San Francisco, CA, USA: IEEE, Oct. 2021, pp. 168–178. doi: 10.1109/IC2E52221.2021.00032. [9] R. Liu, L. Garcia, and M. Srivastava, “Aerogel: Lightweight Access Control Framework for WebAssembly-Based Bare-Metal IoT Devices”. [10] E. Wen and G. Weber, “Wasmachine: Bring IoT up to Speed with A WebAssembly OS,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops), Austin, TX, USA: IEEE, Mar. 2020, pp. 1–4. doi: 10.1109/PerComWorkshops48775.2020.9156135. [11] B. Li, H. Fan, Y. Gao, and W. Dong, “ThingSpire OS: a WebAssembly-based IoT operating system for cloud-edge integration,” in Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, Virtual Event Wisconsin: ACM, Jun. 2021, pp. 487–488. doi: 10.1145/3458864.3466910.