Cloud Native Computing Foundation / Cloud Native Wasm Day North America 2021

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Adopting JavaScript on WebAssembly at Shopify - Saúl Cabrera, Shopify

Server-side WebAssembly is at the core of platform extensibility at Shopify. It enables third-party developers to extend the platform with synchronous custom business logic. Programming language support is one of the fundamental pieces to get right for a platform that is built on top of WebAssembly. The programming language options available are constrained by the use-case requirements. In Shopify's case, developers should be able to write programs using familiar tooling (Node and TypeScript), programs should be safe and their execution should be extremely fast: merchant's complex code needs to be able to run in 5ms or less. In this talk, Saúl will share Shopify's language support journey and showcase how they used Wizer (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wizer) and QuickJS (https://bellard.org/quickjs/) to make it possible to run JavaScript on WebAssembly while meeting Shopify's performance requirements.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Bindles Bundle but They Don't Fall Down: Aggregate Object Storage for Wasm - Matt Butcher, Microsoft Azure & Taylor Thomas, Cosmonic

As interest in WebAssembly (Wasm) continues to increase, a familiar problem has reared its head: how do we distribute and store these new applications? We have tried everything from tarballs, to OCI, to bespoke storage products. But Wasm has a unique characteristic – it enables you to build an application out of several completely different, but related parts. An "application" may be an aggregate of dozens of Wasm binaries. Enter Bindle, an aggregate object storage and Cloud Native Wasm packaging tool. In this talk, we will discuss why we created Bindle, including a deep dive into its strengths and weaknesses. We will also demo how this can be used to package an aggregate application and deploy it to a service, before finishing up with the future of the project and how you can help! Along the way, we'll talk about security, integrity, Merkle trees, caching, and trust.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Create an Extensible Cloud Native Application with WebAssembly - Connor Hicks, Suborbital Software Systems

WebAssembly can be used as a tool to transform your application into an extensible platform. Allowing developers to write code in a variety of languages, and then running that code as part of your application is a very enticing prospect - but it needs to be done in a way that ensures performance and security. In this talk, we'll explore how Wasm can be used to create extensible systems that your users can customize and extend to fit their needs. We'll look at how your services can interact with a Wasm execution environment and run your users' code in a high-performance and secure manner using open source tooling and frameworks. When done correctly, these capabilities can be a huge win for any SaaS product. This talk will ensure that the benefits, drawbacks, challenges, and best practices of Wasm-based extensibility are well known and easy to understand. Developers and low-coders want to make full use of your software, so this talk will cover all the points you need to consider when making your product extensible. Cloud native software is changing, and we want to help the next generation of SaaS applications provide everything that modern developers are asking for.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Distributed Computation with WASM and WASI - Bailey Hayes & Carl Sverre, SingleStore

Distributed computation is a necessary paradigm for modern analytics. WASI-data is a new proposal for a WASI interface-type API that enables portable, host-, and language-independent ecosystems of composable WASM modules to support distributed algorithms. In this talk, we present the WASI-data interface design and demonstrate a reference implementation written in Rust. We will discuss WASI-data's potential to eliminate data lakes and how WASM could become the primary unit of compute for data processing systems.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Helping One of Europe's Banks Re-platform with Declarative, Self-healing, Multi-cloud WasmCloud Clusters on Kubernetes - Stuart Harris & Aayush Attri, Red Badger

Next-generation platforms are evolving away from containers, and towards server-side WebAssembly. wasmcloud leverages a NATS messaging substrate to provide self-healing clusters that can span clouds, whilst remaining unaware of underlying network topology and vendor-specific products. Developer productivity is improved by avoiding boilerplate and building highly focused, lightweight, reliable and secure services. Our talk explores this paradigm shift, and demonstrates a declarative way to deploy distributed applications on a wasmcloud lattice that spans multiple cloud providers across geographic locations. It will also show seamless failover (and recovery) between cloud providers when there is a server outage or a network partition. Red Badger was engaged by one of Europe’s largest banks to help them understand what their future state architecture should look like. Multi-cloud is a must, and resilience and portability are highly desirable. We believe that such a platform looks something like k8s+service mesh+wasmcloud+NATS+GitOps. We've built a PoC platform around this technology which we'd love to talk through, demonstrate, and talk about why this approach is game-changer for the finance industry and beyond.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Leveraging WebAssembly to Write Kubernetes Admission Policies - Rafael Fernández López, SUSE

WebAssembly is an emerging technology that allows the creation of portable units of code that can be executed in a safe way, regardless of the architecture and operating system underneath. Many programming languages already support WebAssembly as a compilation target, and more are joining the ranks. This session will show how Kubewarden allows policy authors to write Kubernetes admission policies using the languages and tools of their choice. Policy authors can tap into existing tools, libraries, frameworks and best practices. This not only lowers the barrier to create policies, but also to review and maintain them. Policies are distributed via regular container registries, can be easily downloaded and tested outside of Kubernetes. This makes it easy to combine Kubewarden into DevOps processes. Finally, Kubernetes administrators can benefit from Kubewarden's integrations with consolidated Cloud Native projects to cover aspects such as distribution, testing and observability.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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: Grain: WebAssembly Development Made - Oscar Spencer, Grain

As WebAssembly takes the cloud computing world by storm, having good tools to work with is more important than ever. While a variety of languages treat WebAssembly as just another compiler target, Grain is one of the first languages built from the ground up to work with WebAssembly exclusively—without sacrificing features you know and love from other web languages, such as closures, pattern matching, garbage collection, and custom types. WebAssembly is a perfect choice for applications that need to be small and performant—Grain is suitable for edge computing, smart contracts, and so much more.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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: High Performance Neural Network Inferencing Using WASI NN - Radu Matei, Microsoft Azure

The sandbox environment and portability of WebAssembly provide an ideal deployment target for neural network inferencing. But while inferencing engines can be directly compiled to WebAssembly, the current limitations around parallelism and hardware acceleration present real limitations to performance. This is the main reason behind WASI-NN, a new WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) specification that enables near-native performance for neural network workloads with hardware acceleration on a variety of devices such as CPUs, GPUs (and in the future TPUs or FPGAs). In this session, we will present the WASI-NN interface proposal and detail the current state of two specialized implementations -- for the OpenVINO and ONNX runtimes. Finally, we will demonstrate an end-to-end process for machine learning, from building and training neural networks using PyTorch or TensorFlow, all the way to running the same neural network and WebAssembly module from different platform architectures and operating systems using the Wasmtime runtime.This project was developed in collaboration with Andrew Brown, Intel.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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: Wasm for Heterogeneous IoT Devices - Dan Mihai Dumitriu, Midokura (Sony Group)

Software for embedded systems has been developed in a monolithic way. Firmware is written by a single vendor, and not updated frequently. Modern IoT devices are constantly connected to the cloud, and OTA updates are possible anytime. Modern IoT devices may be customized, by 3rd parties, becoming true platforms. However, the software development paradigm has not kept pace with this trend. Typical IoT devices do not have full Linux capabilities, no MMU, and thus no HW based isolation. Wasm enables the creation of truly customizable devices. On the server/cloud side, the platforms are relatively uniform - x86 ISA and Linux OS - and the OS can be the abstraction layer. In the IoT domain, that is not the case. IoT device platforms are very heterogeneous. On the ISA side there is at least ARM (32 and 64 bit), RISC-V, Xtensa. On the OS side, there are a myriad of RTOSs. The platform abstraction must be at a higher layer. Wasm can be the abstraction layer for applications on such platforms. We have created a framework and SDK for AI App development. We have benchmarked the performance on ESP32 and on ARM A7. There is a performance penalty and memory overhead vs native, but it is very much acceptable - within a factor of 2. We believe that Wasm will play a key role in IoT development.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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: WebAssembly + Application Runtime = A New Era of FaaS? - Jason Song, Ant Group

In the past years, Application Runtime and WebAssembly have become more and more popular. The idea of Application Runtime is to shield the differences between the underlying infrastructure and provide a unified and semantically clear API to the application. This idea greatly reduces the cost to use the underlying infrastructure. On the other hand, WebAssembly has huge potential in terms of multi-language support, memory-safe and sandbox execution environment. At the same time, we are familiar with the concept of FaaS, but how to realize FaaS and make it productive is still in the stage where there is no unified standard. This talk mainly discusses the combination of Application Runtime and WebAssembly as a solution for FaaS productization. We hope to treat Application Runtime as an independent process, and WebAssembly as the carrier of each Function. The Application Runtime process loads the specified Function on demand and then runs it, similar to a container. We are currently trying to make this design proposal more productive. We will share the problems encountered in this proposal and our thoughts on solving these problems.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Living on the Edge: Using IoT Devices on Kubernetes WebAssembly Applications - Kate Goldenring, Microsoft; Rodrigo Farias Rodrigues Lemos, Federal University of Pernambuco

WebAssembly, Kubernetes, IoT, the “Edge”, and Rust. What happens when all of these are brought together? On the Edge, the smaller and more secure the application the better. Many of these optimizations come out of the box with WebAssembly. Akri is an open source project that discovers IoT devices – like sensors or cameras -- and represents them as requestable resources for Kubernetes clusters on the Edge. As compute resources for nodes on the edge are limited, Akri investigated converting its components to WebAssembly, reducing its footprint and opening a pathway for WebAssembly applications to leverage Akri to use IoT devices. Rodrigo and Kate will discuss the motivation behind the work, the collaboration with and use of Krustlet (a Rust kubelet that enables running WebAssembly applications on Kubernetes), limitations due to early WASI proposals and experiments, and a roadmap for what is to come. It will include a demo of Akri discovering demo devices and a Web Assembly Kubernetes application requesting and using them . This talk will show how the integration of Akri and Krustlet makes using IoT devices easy and simple on the Wasm environment.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Managing WebAssembly Applications Using Docker and k8s Tooling - Michael Yuan, Second State

WebAssembly is a high-performance, lightweight, polyglot, portable, and secure application runtime. It is ideally suited for many cloud-native use cases, such as service mesh, embedded APIs for SaaS, and serverless functions for edge networks. However, as Docker and k8s’ success in cloud-native infrastructure has shown, orchestration and management solutions are crucial for the adoption of application runtimes. In this presentation, Michael Yuan will use the CNCF sandbox project WasmEdge as an example to discuss how to integrate and use widely used cloud-native orchestration tools to manage WebAssembly workloads. Specific topics include the following. - WebAssembly use cases in cloud-native infrastructure - Use runw to add WebAssembly management capabilities in CRI-O - Use crunw to support WebAssembly in k8s - Support WebAssembly as a service mesh sidecar in Dapr and others - Standardization efforts around WebAssembly orchestration and management

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Opening Remarks - Ralph Squillace, Principal PM, Azure Core Upstream, Microsoft Azure

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Panel Discussion: National Association of W Lovers: How We Can Create a Thriving Wasm Ecosystem - Moderated by Matt Butcher, Microsoft Azure; Taylor Thomas, Cosmonic; Bailey Hayes, SingleStore; Oscar Spencer, Grain

Speakers: Taylor Thomas, Bailey Hayes, Oscar Spencer
Just as Java beget a littany of J-titled projects and Kubernetes gave us everything from KOPS to K3S, the emerging Wasm landscape is littered with W names. Wasm Fever has officially begun! And we at DeisLabs are releasing many Wasm-related projects. While it might seem like we're peppering the landscape with arbitrary tools and projects, we have a bigger vision in mind--one focused on building a community and an ecosystem that enables a new generation of portable and secure applications. In this talk, we articulate our ambitions for the WebAssembly community as a whole, and show how our open source projects fit in.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Paving the Way of WebAssembly in the Intersection of Machine Learning and Cloud Native - Shivay Lamba, Layer5; Mritunjay Sharma, Hackerrank

Today, Machine learning can be seen in literally every aspect in life. Machine learning has become more than a buzzword. It is used in almost all fields : from education to cloud native, from Deep Learning to DevOps. The lingua franca of machine learning is Python. However, Python itself is quite slow when it comes to computationally intensive algorithms. On the other hand, Rust could be 25x faster than Python for machine learning. Furthermore, the language of the web is mostly JavaScript. While building machine learning solutions for web applications, performance of the machine learning models is really important and that is already a lot of complexity which often results in poor performance. Rust functions can be compiled into WebAssembly bytecode for runtime safety, cross-platform portability, and capability-based security. Developers can then access those functions from an easy-to-use JavaScript API in the Node.js environment or deployed in cloud-native technologies like WasmEdge. This talk shows how you can integrate machine learning models written in Rust and executed in Web Assembly can be integrated with Nodejs and cloud-native WasmEdge to power machine learning based web applications.

Don’t miss out! Join us at our next event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain from May 17-20. 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.

Sponsored Keynote: The Next Epoch of Technology: Wasm & Actors - Liam Randall, Founder, Cosmonic

The last 20 years of technology have been defined by the rise of dominant abstractions of technology. Virtual machines freed us from the constraints of a specific computer with portable machine images, containers freed us from a specific Linux distribution giving us portable environments, and Kubernetes frees us from a specific cloud giving us portable workload orchestration. The next great abstraction is the application library - freeing us from the constraints of a specific implementation and services. In this talk we will highlight the emerging opportunity and advantages of abstracting away from specific cloud capabilities to actor models.