Cloud Native Computing Foundation / Cloud Native Wasm Day EU 2022

61 736D: An Introduction to the Binary Magic of WASM - Divya Mohan, SUSE

2022 is the year of WebAssembly (or atleast is touted to be)! A quick google search throws up a plethora of blogs, sessions, videos, and podcasts about the basics and the advantages. However, what NOBODY talks about is the binary magic behind-the-scenes that makes WASM the powerful tool it is. There is a textual component that is more human readable & accessible to those who aren't computers, but the binary matrix is where the real magic happens. With an extremely simple byte-by-byte walkthrough of the generated .wasm code referencing the documentation, this talk aims to offer the audience an understanding of the WASM binary while also demystifying its syntactic building blocks with a demo. A sample outline of the session is as below: - Hello, WASM! - A brief introduction to the state of WASM in 2022. - Writing a simple WASM program (demo) - Generating the binary (demo) - Walkthrough of the entire binary code referencing the documentation - Next steps.

Are We Polyglot Yet? - Saúl Cabrera, Shopify

Platform and language independence are considered two of WebAssembly's main advantages, which open the door to new possibilities for secure and polyglot runtime environments and applications. To what extent and how practical is it to achieve polyglot applications on top of WebAssembly today? In this talk, Saúl will showcase – using JS-on-Wasm and Rust – how to leverage WebAssembly's Component Model to create composable, polyglot Wasm applications through safe programming language interoperability.

Bringing WebAssembly to the .NET Mainstream - Steve Sanderson, Microsoft

Many developers still consider WebAssembly to be a leading-edge, niche technology tied to low-level systems programming languages. However, C# and .NET (open-source, cross-platform technologies used by nearly one-third of all professional developers [1]) have run on WebAssembly since 2017. Blazor WebAssembly brought .NET into the browser on open standards, and is now one of the fastest-growing parts of .NET across enterprises, startups, and hobbyists. Next, with WASI we could let you run .NET in even more places, introducing cloud-native tools and techniques to a wider segment of the global developer community. This is a technical talk showing how we bring .NET to WebAssembly. Steve will demonstrate how it runs both interpreted and AOT-compiled, how an IDE debugger can attach, performance tradeoffs, and how a move from Emscripten to WASI SDK lets it run in Wasmtime/Wasmer or higher-level runtimes like wasmCloud. Secondly, you'll hear lessons learned from Blazor as an open-source project - challenges and misconceptions faced bringing WebAssembly beyond early adopters. [1] StackOverflow survey 2021

Building WASM Powered Distributed Stream Platform - Sehyo Chang, InfinyOn

A modern data stack is critical for building data-driven organizations. Yet, technologies available today call for separation between data and compute results in a costly and inefficient data stack. A WASM-based in-line computation removes the barrier between data and computes, opening the door for new types of data stack that can deploy anywhere with hyper-efficiency. This talk will show how the Fluvio open-source project leveraged WASM technology to build a distributed stream platform. The session will discuss the unique challenges of integrating the SmartModule, a WASM-based module system, in a distributed data stack and its benefit in solving various use cases. Sehyo Chang is a creator of the Fluvio project and co-founder of InfinyOn. He has over 30 years of industry experience working on networking, distributed systems, microservices, and zero-trust security frameworks. Before InfinyOn, Sehyo was responsible for the service mesh architecture at NGINX, where he created nginMesh, an NGINX compatibility layer for Istio, and built RUST based module system for NGINX.

Closing Remarks - Bernard Kolobara, Lunatic

WebAssembly is finding its way into different companies and technology stacks. In this closing session, I will share our personal story and why we chose WebAssembly as the central component of our architecture.

Keynote: View from Above: A Birds-eye View of the Wasm Landscape and Where It's Heading - Bailey Elizabeth Hayes, Principal Software Engineer, SingleStore

The technology landscape for Wasm is growing every day. Join me for a tour of WebAssembly, where we will analyze areas of rapid growth for Wasm to predict the future of application development. Wasm is finding a home in every layer of the technical stack. When it comes to creating plugins and adding extensibility to projects, Wasm is rapidly becoming the de facto solution with excellent support for multiple languages. Another trend is serverless where we are seeing Wasm revolutionize application development via actor and event-driven architectures. Looking towards the future, it's not hard to imagine Wasm becoming the default runtime for the entire stack. Imagine applications compiled to Wasm, distributed and networked with a Wasm filter, admitted by a Wasm Open Policy Agent rule, versioned using a Wasm native package manager, Wasm clients that run on any device in the web or edge device, and the expressions used to operate on data are driven by Wasm.

Lightning Talk: From Hardware Simulation to Real Devices with WebAssembly Using TinyGo - Ron Evans, The Hybrid Group

TinyGo (https://tinygo.org/) is a compiler for the Go programming language that is able to produce WebAssembly code that is significantly smaller than the main Go compiler. The TinyGo Playground (https://play.tinygo.org/) is an online web application which lets you compile your code for physical devices in the cloud, and then play with it in your browser using a WebAssembly simulator. You can then also download the native binary code that can execute on real devices using like ARM, Arduino, and even RISC-V. This talk will include live code demonstrations with both simulated and also real-world physical hardware, all using code compiled using the TinyGo Playground, as well as showing some of how the Playground itself is built.

Lightning Talk: WAMR, Intel - Le Yao, Intel

Lightning Talk: WAMR, Intel - Le Yao, Intel

This session introduce the WAMR - a hign performance and small footprint WebAssembly runtime in Envoy. The advantages can get by building envoy with this wasm runtime.

Lightning Talk: Wasmcloud + Bevy ECS: Solution to Woe of Indie Game Developers - Alan, Poon Yong Quan, Shopee

With the rise of independent content creators in social platforms, there is also a growing market for independent software or game creators. Independent game creators should be able to upload game servers as easily as youtubers uploading videos. Very often indie game developers will shutdown their AWS instances, because the losses due to server cost cannot be recuperated. The presentation will demonstrate the maturity of the Wasm ecosystem in providing low cost cloud platforms for game servers.

Running JavaScript, Python, and Ruby in WebAssembly - Michael Yuan, Second State/WasmEdge

Wasm was designed to run applications written in compiled languages such as C/C++, Rust, Swift, etc. However, as Wasm gains popularity, there are increasing demands to run Wasm applications in scripting languages such as JavaScript, Python and Ruby. Compared with native interpreters (or dynamic compilers), Wasm offers benefits to both devs and ops. Dev: Wasm is a polyglot environment that supports mixing high-performance compiled languages and easy-to-use scripting languages. For example, with Wasm, devs can safely wrap Rust functions in a JS API. Op: Wasm is a sandbox with OS access. It can be managed as a standalone container or be embedded in a host. Native scripting language VMs need to be wrapped in other runtimes (eg node) and Docker containers. Wasm can achieve significant savings in computing resources. In this talk, Michael will discuss the approaches and latest progress of Wasm support of scripting languages, like JS, Python, and Ruby. He will cover language interoperability, ecosystem (eg packages and modules) support, and performance characteristics. Finally, Michael will also briefly discuss Wasm support status for popular managed languages such as Java and .Net.

WASI Networking: Towards a World Wide WebAssembly - Nathaniel McCallum & Harald Hoyer, Profian

The advancement of WASI, the WebAssembly System Interface, is key to pushing WebAssembly beyond the browser - from the Cloud to the Edge - allowing developers to build applications that are capable of running in a wide range of architectures and interfacing with an array of systems. One of the most exciting developments has been WASI’s networking support, which will unleash a whole new set of applications. In this session, we’ll explore the current state of WASI networking and cover the recent implementation of sock_accept(). Next, we’ll demonstrate a Wasm server using the Rust mio framework, along with some examples of networked applications. Finally, we’ll discuss the next steps towards building a full fledged networking API and the future of network-enabled WebAssembly applications, including some considerations with regards to deploying network identities and security.

Wasm Beyond the Browser: Use Cases at Scale - Colin Murphy & Sean Isom, Adobe

Adobe makes use of Wasm in its flagship web browser-based products including Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat. This past year it has explored potential use cases for Wasm in edge compute and in the datacenter with wasmCloud. Of particular interest were the potential performance, cost, security, and compliance benefits. Wasm and WASI have many potential advantages over Docker and standard web frameworks in these areas, but what needs to be done to realize those benefits at Adobe? This presentation begins with a summary of Adobe's current use cases, including the toolchains employed and major implementation challenges. It then proceeds to an exploration of CDN edge compute and Wasm/WASI platforms, compelling application and platform features for Adobe, and a demonstration of proofs of concept. It concludes with future looking platform requirements and how Adobe expects to take advantage of this technology at scale moving forward.

What If... Kubernetes Core Pieces Could Be Extended with Pluggable WebAssembly Modules? - Rafael Fernández López & Flavio Castelli, SUSE

One of the most common use cases for WebAssembly are plug-in systems. We think this approach could be beneficial for many Kubernetes core parts. Thus, we decided to make Admission Controllers the first stop of this evolutionary journey. Kubernetes built-in controllers cannot cover all the scenarios an organization has. Therefore, Dynamic Admission Controllers are offered to have a flexible way to extend the core capabilities. These components run outside of the API Server, with the network sitting in between the source of the events and the code doing the actual evaluation. This increases latency and makes the final outcome less certain because new failure scenarios are introduced. That effectively means Dynamic Admission Controllers are less predictable than their built-in counterparts. This talk will show a prototype that leverages WebAssembly as a way to add custom controllers to the API Server. These components will be as predictable as the built-in ones. Moreover, this approach is useful for edge deployments too because it leads to more lightweight environments. This solution releases computation resources for the end user workloads running on constrained edge locations.

Why (and How) We Wrote a WebAssembly CMS - Matt Butcher & Radu Matei, Fermyon Technologies

Our website, Fermyon.com, is powered by a cloud-side CMS written specifically to be compiled to WebAssembly. Bartholomew (our CMS) is blazingly fast, SEO-optimized, and consumes minimal system resources. It is easier to use than the popular static site generators, and has all the benefits of a dynamic CMS. Best of all, it shows the promise of WebAssembly on the cloud side. In this talk, we share the design of this CMS and talk about how it's running. We'll talk about the limitations we encountered (and overcame) with WebAssembly, as well as our early performance and optimization work. Along the way, we will talk about why we chose HashiCorp Nomad as our clustering technology. And we'll introduce Wagi (WebAssembly Gateway Interface), the HTTP engine that powers our CMS.