Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud Native Wasm Day North America 2021, 30 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Lightning Talk: WebAssembly + Application Runtime = A New Era of FaaS? - Jason Song, Ant Group

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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.

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Hello, everyone welcome to cncf awesome day. My topic today is web assembly plus application. Runtime brings a new area of fuss. My name is jason song and currently work for auto group. I'm now mainly focusing on cloud native and micro service areas.

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We have deployed a large service mesh cluster in our production environment up and running for two years. The sidecar is named as motion, which is written in golang and provides similar features as envoy.

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Now there are more than 200k parts in the service mesh cluster and the service mesh has solved our challenges in service connectivity areas. Well, however, as a company with a lot of business scenarios, we are still having challenges in other areas like cache message, queue, etc.

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As the diagram shows they are tightly coupled with the application code.

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For example, if we want to migrate the cache from redis to memory cache, we need to upgrade the sdk on the application site and require the application to change its code to use the new api.

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Another problem is the cost of multi-language support, since we need to develop the logic of protocols, codecs load, balancing disaster recovery for each language sdk, the cost is very high.

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In early 2020 billion ibraheem published an article called multi-runtime microservices architecture.

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The main idea is to abstract the various distributed capabilities into multi-runtime, so that the application no longer needs to rely on specific sdks, but will interact with the wrong time over the factor. Standards such as http grpc, which then solves the challenges just mentioned, and that brings leoto as shown in the diagram. The auto is built on top of motion.

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It provides a unified standard, runtime api with various distributed capabilities.

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Developers no longer need to care about the differences in the implementation of the underlying infrastructure, but only need to focus on what capabilities they need and just call the standard apis.

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Speaking of the runtime api, we know that it is not easy to define a set of apis with clear semantics and wide application scenarios, so we are now working with devel, community and alibaba to build the api hope it could be a standard in the future.

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Here are some excerpts from the api definition we can see. There are apis to invoke services, get set cache, published messages, etc.

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In addition to normal applications, we are also exploring the fast area web assembly. Aka wasam was introduced to web browsers to address performance issues with javascript.

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However, its near native performance, sandboxing and portability features also makes it attractive for fast scenarios with onesie razan provides a high level model for accessing system resources.

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However, in real cases, there are many other resources required to make a normal application work. For example, invoke services, get set, cache, produce or consume messages, etc.

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Lack of these features makes it hard to host the serverless applications in wazon, as they also abstracts a standard api. So we think why not deploying weather modules with lee auto so that wasn't modules could consume external services by, of course, to lay out the cell car.

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However, as motion also has the capability to host whatsapp modules, we then think why not we go further to combine them together. Then we have this diagram. The wazam host motion and the auto are all logical components in one process.

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Quantum host, like wasm edge, is embedded in motion to host weather modules and the auto is used to provide distributed capabilities such as invoking services. Reading cache. These capabilities are exported to wasm as api similar to wazi.

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We wanted to develop a demo to prove this concept, so we did some research and found there has been some exploration about how to integrate kubernetes with wasm.

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The basic idea is to develop a container d stream plugin so that when it receives the request to create a container, it will hand over the actual creation logic to start a wason runtime to host the waza module.

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However, since we want to verify the nano process architecture, so we did some customization, as the diagram shows. We first start a layout to run time on the node to serve as the wasm host and provide distributed capabilities.

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Then we customize the container d shim plugin, so that when it receives the request to create a container it will let leo 2 round was a module. Instead of creating a container with this solution, we could reuse most of the kubernetes capabilities and yet achieve the effect of running multiple watson modules as nano processes in layout and can also take advantage of the auto's distributed capabilities.

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We also reuse docker to package weather modules and submit them to docker hub for distribution.

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Here's a demo showing what we've accomplished so far. There are two razon functions. The first function receives a http request and extracts the book name from the request and then calls the second function to query the inventory of the book and finally, we'll return the inventory information to us.

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We defined the invoke service api with function, id method and param so that they auto could use this information to locate the function and do the invocation.

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Here is the second function when it receives the request, it will use the book name to query redis for the actual inventory and then return the number to the caller.

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We defined the get state api with store, name and key so that they auto could find the correct backend store and the query the value.

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Now, let's build the programs to run some modules.

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Then we could use docker build to build them into darker images.

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We also need to register the runtime class to enable our custom container runtime.

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After that, we could deploy the wasan functions with normal port definitions.

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To make the query work, let's pre-configure the inventory to 100., let's check the function status. Now, let's query the inventory for book one we can see it works. Let's change inventory to 99 and yeah. It returns the latest value cool.

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And finally, let's clean up the resources.

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I hope this demo explains our idea clearly with this demo. We proved this idea could work and we believe, with the fast development of web assembly and application runtime. The possibility to bring a new area of fuss will eventually come true.

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Ok, that's all for my talk thanks for watching and you may check out our github repository for more information have a great day, bye, bye.