wasmCloud Community, 3 Feb 2021

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From YouTube: wasmCloud: New Docs, Landing Page, & Hero Graphics - 2/3/21 Community Call

Description

wasmCloud is a platform for writing portable business logic that can run anywhere from the edge to the cloud, that boasts a secure-by-default, boilerplate-free developer experience with rapid feedback loop.

1. @KevinHoffman walks through the new documentation site https://wasmCloud.dev , plans for user journeys.

2. @LiamRandall then walks through the new landing page, sketches for graphics, and how we're going to help users understand this quickly.

A

All right, everybody welcome to the february 3rd wasn't cloud community meeting. uh Watsonville is a platform for writing portable business logic that can run anywhere from the edge of the cloud that boasts a secure by default. Boilerplate, boilerplate, free developer experience with a rapid feedback blue uh and we've gotten into a tradition of starting army. Actually do we have any new people here today? Justin? Is this your first meeting today.

B

No, no it's not last week was my first.

A

Okay, I can't remember if we did an intro last week or not um so with our new tradition of trying to start each meeting with the demo uh we're gonna start by looking at the new doc site which is live, you can pull along at watsoncloud.dev and follow along uh kevin. Do you want to share your screen, or do you want me to share.

C

uh You're probably gonna have to share. I can't seem to get it to pick firefox tabs all good.

A

All right, so, uh even though this is in flight, um we thought we'd go ahead and just push this out live everybody see my screen. Okay, kevin I'll turn it over to you.

C

I'm not really sure what there is to say here other than you know: we've basically been rewriting our documentation from the ground up over the last year, or so we've just sort of been documenting things in a in a fairly organic way and that ended up producing some fairly disorganized docs and some of it was out of date, and so with this new 0.15 release, where we basically rewrote wasm cloud from the ground up, we're doing the same for the documentation and what we want is sort of different sections of the documentation.

C

Depending on what your goal is. So we've separated it into the the landing page. For you know when you just hit it through a search query or something.

C

uh If you're trying to build applications with actors, then we have all of the you know purpose-driven guides for for that, and then, if you are doing platform building, there's a whole section of guides uh for building platforms on top of wasm cloud and then both the app development and uh platform building sections sit on top of the full reference. Where, if you want, uh you know the excruciating redness hearing detail on things. That's where to go.

A

All right, that's awesome and kevin. What do you think the best way for people is to engage and help you out with this effort right now, uh full requests.

C

Probably pull requests and issues just go to the we have the the github repo for the doc site. uh We know that there is a ton missing, so you know, there's probably no need to flag pages that have tbd written on them has not done, but you know if they're, uh if you have issues with what's there or you think that there is content missing, that that isn't flagged with tbd, then uh by all means drop an issue in there and then we'll take a look at it.

A

Okay, thank you, kevin um I'll, go and transition it into um I've got another demo. Here uh we started to I'm gonna, try to cut the new landing page this week uh and I'm carrying back uh to what I think is the mvp of the landing page. So it'll be the main page. uh Some get uh get wasn't cloud links.

A

You know pulling you taking you into our linking into docs github and packages, a link to the documentation you just saw uh and then a link to our various community resources like where do you find our stuff here uh and then uh there was a pre-pre-call discussion that we were kind of talking through around the experience that we're working towards around you know having some kind of coded tutorials or what is that experience going to be like some kind of live environment?

A

You can land on that's something that we're still kind of thinking through, but we want to get everything cut over and what I'd love to stop quickly and get some feedback on is you know? I've got kind of the um some of the value props kind of called out here on rapid development. uh Polygon platform pleasantly portable completely connected securely scalable, but I need to do some uh images.

A

So what I I'd like to spend a few minutes doing is walking everybody through a jamboard uh and getting some um some feedback here on some of these uh images. So let me do this.

A

um Let's see if I can do this two ways here, uh uh so um here's the what we're thinking about the architecture um you know this was the kind of map that we came up with uh and I'd love to just open the call here and let anybody uh you know chime in on this- and you know, tell me what you think um if this starts to tell the story: we're not sure what the kind of shape should look like for the general architecture, but at the bottom we think we call out.

A

You know that you've got your choice of wasm run times uh right now, wasn't three and wasn't time by default. Talk about why we have wasm. Three is the default because there's no uh cold start penalty, but for long term prod wasn't time may be a good choice, mention the wapc uh intermediate layer and then talk about the application runtime on the top. So does this image resonate with everybody in the next view, kind of break it into more detail um radio anybody uh uh comments.

A

Okay, so then we uh we're gonna sketch out, you know, maybe some slides here or some little call out boxes on the side that maybe kind of walk through in an animated, gif style or something and at the bottom we say you know this is where the sandbox comes from. This enables cross-platform portability.

A

This enables deny, by default, um the ypc layer enables the bi-directional rpcs uh and um uh polyglot contract driven development. um You know you write your whittle uh and then you choose your language and you get your templates generated and then at the top, we've got declarative deployments with the scheduler, the distributed, runtime, scaffold generation um and everything else.

A

um You know we kind of toyed with an analogy around making some analogies to uh compatible with kubernetes but not dependent upon, but I think the platform slides are probably another whole set of concepts here uh and then we wanted to document sort of how we thought the lattice worked, which we would show whatever shape we align on if they're pyramids or you know like little triangles or whatever uh these things are going to be, that we show a bunch of them connected through lattices and then lattice is connected through lattices.

A

So we're talking about the distributed uh mesh um and multi-tenant mesh um kevin had a concept around. Maybe doing you know like trees and leaves here kevin did. I did I accurately capture that or do you want to expand on that a bit?

A

Well, you know just.

C

One of the other possible visualizations is a graph with leaf nodes on it, but I'm certainly not not fixed on that. One solution: no not actual real trees.

A

Oh, not real, trees, okay, oh I just wanted to just be a little interactive with you. That's all um okay, so you think that maybe uh the feedback here is uh maybe we researched like um uh like uh graph uh node, um uh art and and maybe try to be inspired on that right.

C

Or you know, we could take some inspiration from pac-man and do pretzels and cherries.

A

uh I'm not gonna draw pac-man because it would truly show how terrible of an artist I truly am, uh and this is where things kind of fell apart- is that our app started to look like a mushroom uh a bit here. uh So when we we started to think about even how we defined an application in uh wasn't cloud, um we really one. We we teased out a couple of ideas here. We thought that were important to highlight.

A

The first was that the sort of underlying infrastructure doesn't influence the design, which felt like a really powerful concept that we weren't emphasizing enough um here that you know this app topologically could all be running on one box on multiple boxes through lattice, that all of those details were abstracted away from us um and that the runtime decides where so. This is where we were trying to think through. You know this is supposed to be.

A

You know, actor one actor, two with capabilities, one and two, maybe some lattice, and we then we think about you- know the kind of like deployment here, how we're going to surface that as a as a picture. um uh I think we need some help, for this is where the pyramid doesn't feel right to me.

A

Even if we just do like some columns together, I feel like we could tell a better story around the different layers of abstraction here and when they, when they come into play, uh and then when we um started to talk through composing the application.

A

We have this idea of of a um uh what was the directed napkin scratch uh sketch kevin? What was the word? We came up with there.

C

Yeah, I think it was something like directed napkin sketch.

A

Yeah um the that the napkin sketch that that what we the story we thought about telling here was that you know day one when developers first sit down and um you know design their app. You know on this uh proverbial, you know, uh napkin sketch, you know, you'd start by. You know just sketching out. You know logic blocks here and saying you know this. Is you know I'm doing my work here?

A

You know my thing: it's going to talk to the database uh and then it's going to talk to the world, and that was the kind of um thought process we were going through here. So if we stick with the napkin sketch, maybe this shows up, as you know, a series of of boxes um where we say like you know, step one, two, uh three and four, and we start by having you know the napkin sketches.

A

You know one. You know maybe uh the uh step two is, then uh you know you run the the wizard right, um but we need some simple way to sort of like you know, what's our one two three journey here to tell it um so that's what we're trying to sketch um a sketch around there with the various app models um and things like that uh and um and then so our story time became step. One is going to be this uh directed napkin graph, you know kind of sketch and then step.

A

Two is scaffold uh step step. Four is uh except three: is um you know providers? Maybe this was 2b? Was providers are built? Rarely so we make that another journey uh and then step four is uh exec and we obviously forgot um you know dot dot profit on here, um which we should do in green dot, dot profit which should be on there right um does this? Does this resonate with you guys? As far as like the three steps or the four steps being this anybody.

D

uh I I have a little bit of feedback if this is a good time. Yeah, um I'm going to channel my inner ronin, so ronin developed almost all of the open source websites from dapper and rudder to helm and and brigade, and all of the uh ones we've done, and his sort of design principle is figure out. What the simple story you want to tell up front is tell that one on the first step and then gradually increase complexity.

D

So, if you're targeting developers step, one should be, uh you know either the napkin story or if you want to go one step prior to that, and do this super simple hello, world actor story right and then you just kind of increment through and then toward the end.

D

That's when you transition to the operator story, if you're shooting for developers first right if it's operators first start with the simple operator story, tell them what exact problem you're solving then go into increa, because if you hit them with the complex part first, they assume that it starts complex and gets more so from there. They don't assume the simple story.

C

Is like folding, a napkin into a paper airplane and sailing it towards production.

D

Yeah and and if that's you know starting that's actually a great great uh and now actually that would make for a pretty good video. I think um and then uh because the people who are most likely to be early adopters are the ones who want to get from zero to uh endorphins and development developers.

C

Who want um instant gratification on being able to see their design run?.

D

Yeah and then the other, you know the people who are trying to get the depth the full depth view of it will click through all the different steps to see everything. But if you start with the uh here's, all the all the power you get and it's a big overwhelming diagram, then you lose your your tire kickers right away. Yeah the complexity should be uh exposed on demand rather than uh shoveled at you yeah. So that's that's. The way ronin tends to design sites.

D

Actually the one of my favorite ones he ever did was the draft.sh site uh just because of the way he tried to use some of the background imagery to convey some of it. um So you see yeah if you as it loads you'll, see the little sort of like step-by-step thing, that he did it just kind of.

C

Yeah I like this- I think something similar might be, that might be usable for what we're doing. Where you have the uh the napkin then the sketch on it, and then it gets shipped to broad sort of a thing.

D

Yeah and you'll have a lot of challenge in displaying the power of the lattice in a really in that same kind of really intuitive one. But I I have. I have faith.

A

All right, no, I love this okay, so we think that um up here at the top, you know this image should be the napkin sketch you know be like it should be an animated gif. That's like one! I draw on a napkin uh two, I fold the napkin and three. I throw it into prod or something like that. Okay or like maybe the maybe the napkin becomes real, and then it goes into prod or something along those lines. Okay, all right!

A

Well, there's a definitely a ton of inspiration there on um uh onto onto what we should be doing there and I definitely love all those concepts. This is super helpful uh from a feedback perspective. So thank you, matt does anyone else have any conceptual ideas they wanted to kind of like talk through or suggestions.

E

uh One note um there were in all the architecture: uh slides uh providers was only mentioned once uh was that deliberate or was that uh omitted by accident? Just because there's talk about actors capabilities, um but no real talk about providers and until the four-step process, where it's kind of like a side note.

C

Well, so, the in the in the interest of trying to keep complexity uh pulled up on demand developers who are trying to build the the simple actors they're. They should be able to reuse all of the the stock capability providers in order to get their design uh running in production.

C

It's only when uh they uh sort of go beyond the the the basic hello world steps, and they want more complexity that we then introduce. The idea of you know arbitrary providers or creating your own providers. Things like that.

A

Yeah, that makes sense- uh that's a great, uh but I think that is aligned to the kind of journey of the starting, simple and then any complex.

A

You know we we toyed around forever with this concept of honeycombs and beehives, and you know stuff like that, and he would even like talked about instead of wasm cloud, maybe trying to call it live hive or something like that, uh but um so none of that really stuck um all that well. But uh this was a really great feedback um when we think about how we're gonna explain this journey um so I'll.

A

Take this back and um I'm gonna cut the landing page regardless so watch for, like you, know, a really pathetic set of images here. um For this- and probably you know these right here, I'll probably take screenshots from all the great demos you guys have given in the last few months and use those and then look for us to just cut it, um but thinking of like providers, we were already thinking through. Like you know, how are we telling the story here on?

A

You know what's available in the ecosystem, and um you know uh those kind of things still. Obviously, a lot of a boilerplate on this um on this template, um but I'll go ahead and stop uh sharing uh my screen and, um let's see uh so, let's go ahead and actually go back to the agenda here, but thank you for the feedback on that. I welcome any pointers in slack or offline. If anybody, the callout to draft.sh, is phenomenal butcher. Thank you so much um a ton of community stuff going on right now.

A

It's all listed on the agenda I'll just run through some of this real quick um as a call out. uh There is early registration for kubecon eu uh as and you can also register for a wasm cloud, uh conf wasm, uh which is the may, the fourth cloud native uh webassembly event uh that we'll hopefully all be participating in. I point out that this ends on february the 14th, and uh what sweetheart for valentine's day would not want a discounted early bird ten dollar admission. uh All access pass to kubecon.

A

I know that my sweetheart who's sitting near me would love that uh um so just a heads up to go ahead and get your registrations in yeah I'm giving those out instead of real presents.

A

I think those are great. Actually, uh the webassembly summit is april 22nd uh uh the cfp, for this has already closed uh as more information comes out. I'll try to highlight it here. uh Kevin has a talk upcoming in the uk uh that we don't have any details for yet, uh but as soon as we do I'll get it out on here in twitter, tomorrow is the wasm time bi-weekly meeting and open call any other events to call out.

A

All right so back to um developer stuff. As far as uh things to call out, I think, brooks you've been just trying to slay through the um remaining uh the remaining actor interfaces here. Do you want to give us an update on that? Maybe.

F

Sure yeah- and you may have seen this in the wasmcloud channel. I think I threw it in there last night, just a list of all the interfaces, all the providers, all the examples that need to be updated and uh true to the emoji, like the meat emoji, it's kind of a heavy list, but it doesn't include the work that we've already done.

F

So we've already done a lot of work here um we only have, I think I think we only have one more actor interface to do and rust once we merge in our open pr's that we have so and then once we do that the providers and the examples are- um are pretty much free game to to refactor to the new interfaces.

F

So a lot of that work, uh you know, is it's all documented in those um in that checklist. If you're looking to contribute to wasmcloud. I kind of put this call out in the in the channel, but if you've had your eye on, you know a capability provider that you're interested in or something like that feel free to take a look into it. But that's pretty much been uh my focus for the last couple of days, just getting those in.

A

Super uh and um if there's anybody to call that's not in slack or anybody that watches this on youtube later, I know we've got maybe 100 people that are consuming uh youtube feeds feel free, just to drop us an email or dm on twitter, and we can add you directly to uh to slack if it's more convenient for you to get caught up, we're trying to build a really open and inclusive community here, which means we want. We need more than developers. We need people to help with documentation, planning organization, graphics, creative people.

A

You know everybody's welcome in wasn't cloud uh and that's the kind of community we're building out I'd also call out uh brooks you contributed a new provider this week on the graph db stuff. Do you want to speak to that briefly.

F

I can speak to it briefly. Yeah we had an older example of ours included a redis graph capability provider which just allows you to interact with a redis graph graph db, and we had an example that was an actor and interacted with a graph db. It was just a quick sample actor that was used. The the actual capability used to be used in gantry the project that we used to host uh our old actors, but transitioning that to an actor interface, was a pretty neat experience because we're kind of retrofitting our old code.

F

With these new interfaces and it it was a good learning experience to get in to get into everything. And now our old example is updated to the 0.15 way and fully powered by an actor interface.

A

Okay, great uh and then um uh fisher, I think, um uh you're getting ready to send over the crosslit losing cloud provider. Is that right.

B

um Yeah taylor's actually uh going through that process. Right now, but yeah we just finished the crosslit version, 0.6 release, and so with that finalizing some of the stuff there we're finally ready to kind of start cutting over the wasp provider. It literally was just filting.

A

Filtering the get history in the background here, and so it's uh I'm just extracting things to preserve, get history and move it over. So it's it should be over today. um I'm going to see if I can force push over the top of that. Otherwise I mean I should I'll see what happens. Yeah, I'm just going to rewrite it with all of our history, so it stays and then um and then do some renaming. So it's no longer called the wask provider.

A

The artist formerly known.

C

As wasp provider, that's good because I mean nothing is nothing. Bad has ever happened with a force, push.

A

Well, no one's using the repo, so nothing should happen bad with this one excellent uh and then um I I'd actually uh turn it over now to uh to anyone else uh kevin if there's any other call outs or brooks or uh chris, you know across the board here anybody that um has anything they want to call out on or highlight on the project side.

C

uh The first uh tiny go actor interface is is almost ready to go as well. I've got that um I'll probably be able to set up a full request for that shortly after the meeting.

A

F

I've got a I've got two things I like to call out. um One thing I don't know if gustav is on the call right now, but he submitted an awesome uh feature to wash earlier this week. That made it so that all the commands get executed in a separate thread and what that means is previously.

F

When you're executing things in the repl, you would run your command wait for it to finish, or at least to acknowledge that you made that command, and then you can start typing again now the way that it is where those commands are run in the background everything's like executed asynchronously, so as you're typing in commands, they're executed, and then you can watch the output come in, but you don't actually sit there waiting for anything to happen anymore, which is awesome, and so I don't.

F

I don't see him on the call, but thank you to gustav for putting that in, and the last thing is that people seemed pretty interested in the kb counter. Example that we've been running for the demos in various forms and fashions: oh yeah. If you want to take a look at what this looks like pasting in a demo, script is like executes immediately, and then you can see events happening on the host as time goes on.

A

Yeah, that's awesome. Yes, sorry brooks. I didn't mean to cut you off on your next point. There I was just trying to do some narration or some visualization, as you were, going on.

F

Yeah no worries so the the other thing people people seem pretty interested in the kb counter script that we have, and now that we have all of our uh artifacts published to our azure container registry. I wrote up a little uh bash script. I put it in the chat if you wanted to. If anybody wants to play with this, it just schedules the actors and providers that you need for the kb counter example and then gives you the example curl and example call requests that you can do so.

F

This is kind of just an in advance way of getting this out there before our documentation is written, but if anybody was looking to play around with a local host- and they haven't done anything yet all you need is wash and then the docker compose that comes in the repo. So it's pretty well self-contained.

A

Great and uh all the packages are available there for anybody that wants to experiment with this. You can they're up on package cloud they're linked that wasn't cloud.dev as well, for installing and brew is available too, to get watch going on natively on the map, um and so uh brooks. Is this wash tools directory? Is this where you know you're gonna build out some of these little toy demos, and you know like uh examples here.

F

For now, I think that's what it makes sense to put in there. uh I thought about having like an examples directory, but that seems like something that would belong more in the wasm cloud. Actually, the the wasmcloud runtime repo, if we're going to be starting a host and scheduling things on it. So uh for now, I'd love to keep putting these little quick snippets here so that people can get started because that's what wash is trying to do make it easier to get people to get for people to get started with wasm cloud.

A

You know- and I I call out for anybody- that's you know following along because they think there's a lot of potential in this project, but hasn't felt comfortable contributing your inexperience is a huge asset to us.

A

uh I fielded a call from somebody um uh last week and they were a little frustrated that they hadn't found a place to plug in, and I said well, look you know running this demo as a first-timer is priceless to us right now, because I would love people to do is open up a google doc when you do that and write down your questions that you have around what you thought, what you were thinking what you thought you had to do, what your perceptions were.

A

That's super valuable feedback to us at the moment, because it helps us to understand. We've all been immersed in this for so long. We don't we're not even aware of the hidden assumptions and biases uh and uh sort of insights that we bring to our simple demos and we're missing some of that sort of first timer experience. So a call out to anybody that would love to love to do. That would be much appreciated and you know your feedback there.

A

Okay, awesome anyone else. Anyone on the call anybody in the related ecosystem, microsoft, folks, uh uh anyone else.

A

All right: well, I think we had a pretty fast call today uh we are, you know really close to you know tying this one off and um uh we need to get the um uh you know. The release party scheduled uh I'm late on that, but everyone in slack is more than welcome to come. It'll be a similar snow globe theme that we had in the in the last one uh upcoming, documentations or upcoming demos.

A

uh Phil uh uh has been kind of thinking through his vision on how he's going to do the whittle uh kind of walk through and demo. um You know, underneath um the hood here, uh we've got the bindle conversation still uh to have. We've got um the sort of updated code gen uh and possibly pulling the generator uh from the wpc layer up into wash.

A

um I would love to get a larger crust lit update. I guess we got one. um Last week uh uh then katakota tutorials uh crosstalk wasn't three on small devices kevin's working on his edx class and the yeoman ypc. um uh You know kind of uh kind of stuff that we've I heard about. um Maybe those would all make great topics.

A

Anyone else all right, I'm gonna go ahead and just stop recording we'd. All hang on and kind of, hang out a bit.