Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud Native Wasm Day EU 2021, 14 May 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Lightning Talk: Building web services for a future based on WebAssembly - Connor Hicks, 1Password

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 in Los Angeles, CA from October 12-15. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Lightning Talk: Building web services for a future based on WebAssembly - Connor Hicks, 1Password

In this talk, Connor will dive into Atmo, an open source framework designed for building cloud native applications using WebAssembly modules. Atmo is enabling developers to build their applications with the popular patterns of serverless computing, while harnessing the power and security of WebAssembly. Connor will show how WebAssembly makes it easier to deploy an application to the cloud by demonstrating Atmo's unique development patterns, easy to use APIs, and straightforward deployments. Connor will also be providing extensive example code and a deep dive into what makes WebAssembly the next iteration of cloud software development.

A

Hello, my name is connor hicks, I'm a staff developer and one password, and for the last year and a half or so I've been building suborbital, which is a group of open source repos that work together to make webassembly on the server a useful and practical tool. I'm going to be talking about building web services for a future based on webassembly and I'm going to be doing a deep dive into atmo, which is one of the sub-orbital projects.

A

So a little bit more about what suborbital does. It is a collection of projects. It started out as a functions as a service system, but has since evolved to include multiple projects that are all working together towards this goal of server-side webassembly.

A

So the projects are reactor. It's a job scheduler, it's kind of the core that actually runs the webassembly modules. It manages their memory inputs, outputs and all the asynchronous execution that needs to happen.

A

Grav is a message, bus that allows go applications to communicate asynchronously using plugins for discovering each other and also actually communicating with each other over various protocols, and then vector is an http framework that integrates really tightly with grav and reactor, and when you put those three together, it forms atmo, and that is what I call the batteries included web assembly framework and includes all of the apis and the server server-side runtime that allows you to build. Cloud-Native applications with webassembly and atmo is being developed alongside what I call the sufa design pattern.

A

This is a way of building applications that they're easy to understand and easy to deploy. So sufa stands for simple, unified function based applications, and it quite simply means that your application should be simple to understand and simple to deploy using something like a simple, auto scaling group. It should be unified, meaning that when you build them, it results in a single thing. That thing can be a docker image or it can be an atmo application bundle.

A

But you don't need to build many docker images or many different things in order for your system to work properly and then function based means that you are segmenting your application into multiple different functions that are composed together to form your business logic and we'll talk about how that works.

A

Using the directive, which is a declarative file that describes your application and actually lets you compose those functions together using different control flows and different clauses and operators that make it really easy to work with complex logic. We'll talk about a whole lot more of that in a minute, so we're gonna go deep into atmo. I'm gonna give you a quick tour of an apple application and we'll talk about how it all works.

A

The application that I'm going to go through is called telescope. It is on my github. My github is cohex c-o-h-I-x. You can find all the source code there and you can try it out for yourself, so the directive is where everything starts, and so I'll take you through a quick tour of it. uh It describes all the endpoints that this application will provide things like getting files getting a list of repos, getting a single repo and generating report.

A

We'll talk about this one a little bit more later, but the overall goal of the application is to provide information about the repos in an organization. So let's dive in and look at the list, repos runnable.

A

So this one's written in rust, atmos supports rust and swift and more languages are coming soon, but what they all have in common is they use something called the suborbital runnable api in order to gain access to capabilities that server side applications need to operate properly, so things like access and cache making http requests and more. These are all granted by the host to work with the webassembly sandbox, ensure you have everything you need to build your application without sacrificing the security that webassembly provides.

A

So the runnable itself conforms to the runnable trait, and that just means it has a run function that takes an input, provides either an output or an error, and then it uses that runnable api to actually do something interesting. So in this case, we're using the file api to get some configuration, and this allows you to actually package static files with your application and they get mounted as a read-only file system that you can access from your modules.

A

So, for example, if I'm getting this organization configuration file, that tells me which organization that the application is being run against and I can use things like the http client and access things like a cache.

A

Now, this directive is using the the runnable to respond directly to the request, and so the runnable responds with json and actually sets some response. Headers like the content type.

A

So let's take a look at what it actually means to run this application, we're going to use the suborbital cli tool, which is called subo and we're going to run subo build I'm going to pass the native flag, because I want to use the tool chains on my local machine.

A

If you don't have the various language tool chains installed, subo, actually, ships with a docker runtime that can build your applications without needing to have, for example, the cargo tool chain installed. So it builds all of my webassembly modules and it builds a bundle that includes the webassembly modules, my static files and my directive. So it's everything that atmo needs to actually execute my application.

A

So if I start up a development server here using subodev, it is going to start atmo and we can take a look at how it works.

A

So I'll start by making a request to that repos endpoint to get a list of all of the repos in the suborbital organization and take note that it took about 300 milliseconds to respond to that request. You know it was talking to the github api, so there's multiple network, hops involved, etc.

A

But if you'll remember, we were talking to the cache and we were actually filling that in with repo information.

A

So if we go over here and make a request to get a single repo you'll notice that it executes much more quickly because the get repo runnable is actually accessing the cache and if the repo information is available, it is returning that. But if it's not, it goes accesses the github api and then fills in the cache behind it.

A

So that's an example of some of the different sub-orbital runnable apis available, but let's look at a slightly more complicated handler, so this report endpoint, for example- it combines multiple runnables together in order to do something a little bit more fun, so we're using the list repos runnable from the other handler, but instead of just responding directly with that information, this particular handler actually uses the for each operator to iterate over the array of repos and perform an operation on each element.

A

So we're actually going to be calling the send report runnable on each element of the repos list and that send report function, looks a little bit like this.

A

It's going to get the element that it is being operated upon. It's going to filter out the repos that have less than 5 stars.

A

It is going to read a configuration file called webhook to know where it wants to send this report to, and it's going to construct a payload and then actually send a web hook using the http client. So why don't? We take a look at that if we send that api v1 report request you'll, see something happening in the background here and we're actually getting some messages in discord uh and we're getting a report about the various repos and the number of stargazers that they have as long as they have more than five.

A

So this is, you know a couple of different examples about how you can compose webassembly modules together to form uh logic, and I hope it's a good example of how webassembly can be useful on the server.

A

Now there is a bunch of additional apis that I didn't talk about here, and there are a number of other control flow clauses that you can use in the directive. So I suggest you look at atmo.suborbital.dev to see the entire documentation and what is possible.

A

The subo cli also has a number of other features as well that I suggest you check out it's very useful for building webassembly applications, whether they're being used for atmo or not.

A

So that's the end of the demo and I just want to close out by saying thank you for having me at the conference and I hope you'll check out suborbital at github.com suborbital and please don't hesitate to open issues or join our discord. If you have any questions or if you want to ask about building something with one of the projects.

A

So that's all for me- and I will see you all in the conference.