Cloud Native Computing Foundation Kubernetes Community Days Bangalore 2022, 11 May 2022

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From YouTube: Managing WebAssembly apps with Kubernetes

Description

Developers can leverage container tools such as Kubernetes, Docker and CRI-O to deploy, manage, and run lightweight WebAssembly applications. In this talk, there will be a demonstration of how Kubernetes ecosystem tools work with WasmEdge WebAssembly applications. Compared with Linux containers, WebAssembly could be 100x faster at startup, have a much smaller memory and disk footprint, and have a better-defined safety sandbox. However, the trade-off is that WebAssembly requires its own language SDKs, and compiler toolchains, making it a more constrained developer environment than Linux containers. WebAssembly is increasingly used in Edge Computing scenarios where it is difficult to deploy Linux containers or when the application performance is vital.

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Hello, everyone welcome to my talk at communities. Community days, bangalore, 2022. The title of my talk is managing webassembly applications with kubernetes, a very quick introduction about myself, I'm siwai lamba, I'm currently a contributor and one of the company members from layer 5, which is the community for service meshes.

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It has a number of different projects currently intubated under the cncf, including mystery, uh which has been created for quite a few months now, and I've also been a group transport mentor for cncf again for the mystery project, and I've also been a former mesh mate and maintainer for the mystery project, so without wasting any further time. Let's get started so first thing: let's start off with what exactly is webassembly today we know that you know webassembly is growing really popular.

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So, let's just try to understand what exactly is web assembly and then we'll move forward so web assembly. It's essentially a binary instruction format and you can just think of it as a really small, efficient, highly secure uh stack, based virtual machine that doesn't really care of which particular cpu or os it sort of works on uh it's a format to sort of define instructions that an appropriate interpreter can execute.

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So essentially, it's basically designed to execute portable bytecode, which is sort of compiled from languages such as c c, plus rust, python and sort of runs at near native speed, because it directly interacts with the os or with the system itself, and uh originally it was designed to be work with.

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uh Like you know, web browsers, it is not meant to be sort of a replacement for javascript, but basically work with javascript to allow other programming languages to be actually able to run their execution on the browser for a lot of tasks that required much more compute power.

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uh So originally it started on the client side, but now it is also actually been able to run on server side and also in edge applications that are, of course uh not related to the browser, and now we have at least some sort of support for multiple uh scripting languages and also, of course, general languages such as cec plus list.

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Now, let's discuss about was image, so versamage is basically a cncf sandbox project that is essentially a lightweight really high performance and extensible web assembly runtime. That has been specially designed for cloud native edge and decentralized applications, and uh it is one of the fastest run times that is available right now for web assembly uh because of using llvm and of course uh previously, it is also uh known as uh server side virtual machine uh ssvm, so uh that is uh with uh awesome edge. Now uh we will talk about.

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Why exactly does the communities community need wasm edge right? So we know that communities managed uh microservices today are gaining a lot of popularity and essentially that raises the demand for lightweight containers that are appropriate for such kind of workloads.

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Now, if we compare uh webassembly with docker containers or linux containers, uh web assembly provides a much more better security isolation and also cross-platform support as compared to linux containers.

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When we talk specifically about edge-based devices, which have very limited amount of resources, and also we know that linux containers, like you know, can actually be very cumbersome and also can be highly resource intensive when we are specifically talking about edge-based devices. That is where, like you know, the bosom based uh devices are actually much more better.

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So if you're using like, let's say wasm as a container as compared to uh linux, uh like you know, awesome uh container will actually be just one person the size of a linux container application and also will uh be like you know, really helpful for running on its devices, since they run natively directly on uh the device itself and, like you know, of course, that means that they have a very less start time that makes web assembly really great for edge-based applications that, like you know, will be part of the community's ecosystem.

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And but of course there is like you know, certain pain points that are there so uh with web assembly. They require its own set of language, sdks, compiler tool chains to basically me to actually run it. That makes it a little more constrained, uh developer environment as compared to linux containers.

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uh So what's the solution is that we can actually run the linux containers and the webassembly uh application side by side in the same system and developers can actually leverage the use of, uh like you know, two container tools such as docker communities, cryo to essentially run deploy these web assembly applications alongside the other, uh like you know, linux containers as well. So let's try to understand how can we actually achieve this?

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So our goal is really to load and run the webassembly oc images side by side with the linux oci images that essentially, for example, contain things such as uh docker containers across the entire community stack. And how will we sort of uh achieve this? So let's say that if we have communities at the top of course, there are multiple ways in which we can run communities. We can have communities itself or we can have like you know smaller versions such as k3s uh kind. All, of course these are all different type of runtimes.

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That allow for, like you know, deploying and running uh community spots, then of course comes with the high level container runtime such as cryo container d. So you can either use cryo or you can use container d. Then you of course, have the load uh level container runtimes without the ocr runtimes.

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So you can either use like you know, a c run which is based on c, and you have other ones based on other languages as well and finally, uh one side you have the linux container images and uh the other one would be the webassembly app images uh so this. Basically, this is the container ecosystem that we're going to be looking at and now we'll look at a step by step uh on how we can actually achieve this. So first, what we are going to talk about, we are talking about using c run right.

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So basically, the cnn project uh now actually supports wasm edge as one of the container runtimes, as you mentioned, that was image, is basically a runtime for web assembly and since, like you know, uh cnn is widely supported for the communities ecosystem. That essentially means that now awesome edge applications can run anywhere wherever there is support for kubernetes. uh There are few prequisites that you'll need in order to actually accomplish this, so the first one is cryo.

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You can look at this uh link that is there in the slides to basically set up and install cryo. It's essentially a high level container on time. That basically pulls. Maybe this, uh for example, from docker hub, manages on disk and launches, basically a lower level runtime to run all the different container processes, then we'll need wasa mesh itself and also we'll need communities again.

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If you want to, uh like you know, use like a local installation of communities and run local pods, you can follow uh the particular link to install and actually run communities uh directly in your local linear system. So the first thing that we'll do is that we'll, like you know, start uh running kubernetes, so you can follow the following commands in a terminal window so that uh it sets up communities uh inside of your local development environment.

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The next thing that we'll do is that we'll actually start our communities cluster. So you can follow all these specific commands uh to, like you know, start the cluster, and essentially this will allow us to run the webassembly programs in communities as containers in the community spots and then for running the web assembly. Application and communities we'll basically take a simple, webassembly washi program that is currently uh a part of a container which that we are fetching from docker hub and uh we are going to be running it in the kubernetes cluster.

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So you can follow this particular command uh to basically run this so that it fetches the uh the container image from docker hub and then actually runs it on the kubernetes cluster. Once it has successfully done that, you should be able to actually see the following output where, basically, you are running the aussie example dot wasm file, and uh we see like the file content as well, and uh that's way that we were able to actually run our web assembly application inside of a community's pod inside of a community's container.

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So, what's next right, so as you know that in communities application like you know, the one of the most popular architecture is for microservices and how microservices sort of you know help to sort of uh like you know, move away from, like you know uh the monolith architecture and actually run these uh control services uh independently and uh possum is, is actually very suitable for such kind of use cases because person mets can be used for uh distro, less debugging and actually running these containers, or, let's say as a service mesh uh as well, and when you're sort of combining communities with wasa meds.

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It has a lot of wide range of applications, uh especially if you're running on, like you know, edge-based devices, and here are a few resources that you can sort of look into uh to basically run possum on awesome. uh Basically was them on communities. So, apart from, uh like you know, the was image project. You also have crustlet that allows to basically run a web assembly in, like you know, uh in uh communities.

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That's also one of the other alternative uh that you can actually look at and, of course, there are some like you know, uh other projects that uh are currently there to basically help convert a web assembly to like an oci compliant uh that can actually be run directly in kubernetes.

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So you can sort of have a look at all of these different resources and of course, if you have liked uh my talk, you can connect with me on my twitter at the hardware up in case you have any questions from today's talk and now I'll be more than happy to take up any questions. Thank you so much for attending this talk and I hope to see you in person very soon in other communities community days events, including kcd uh bangalore. Thank you very much.