wasmCloud Community, 24 Nov 2021

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From YouTube: wasmCloud: Washboard Hot Reload Demo, Roadmap Review, Community Announcements! - 11/24/2021

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.

A

Happy thanksgiving eve and welcome to another wasn't claude wednesday for wednesday november 24th as usual, we're going to kick it off with the demo. Let me turn it over to alt. Brooks all bro brooks give us a go.

B

Hello, everyone welcome to wasmcloud wednesday. This is alt, brooks bringing you a demo of the hot reload feature that we're adding to wasmcloud 0.50.4.

B

You should be seeing coming out pretty soon and- and I just want to show you today a little bit more about how this feature works, explain a couple things about it and show how it's really helping the developer feedback loop for developing webassembly actors with wasmcloud.

B

So to start some of the things that I grabbed before this demo, I went ahead and started the http server and the kb redis providers. These are the wasm cloud providers that allow our actors, our web assembly actors to receive http requests and then subsequently reach out to a key value database and interact with a database like redis.

B

So what and and then the other thing that I have is the uh one of our example actors is the kv counter actor you may have seen it before, but all it does is receives an http request. It defines this handle request handler and then it increments a counter in a key value database.

B

So um the only other thing that I've done is run cargo build so that it doesn't have to take me five minutes while I'm running this demo, but if we use the uh the the make step in here, this is going to run cargo build in release mode for us and it's going to assign our actor based on some things that we specify uh in the the actor configuration template.

B

Now all of this comes with our project templates by default. If you generate a new actor using wash you get, these make steps automatically. So everything I'm doing in this demo. You have access to and you can do the same thing with the kb counter actor.

B

So now that I've built and signed my actor, it's ready to run in a wasm cloud host. So I'm going to get our I'm going to get our demo going, I'm going to start our actor and then link it to our two capability providers.

B

Now what you may be used to is seeing this under the start actor button, we have the from file and from registry. Well now we have from file in parentheses, hot reload, and what this does is it exam? It watches the file on disk you're, your signed actor and any time it changes. So if you change the capability claims that you use with it, if you change the business logic in the actor itself and the rest actor it'll automatically replace all running instances of that actor with the new actor on disk.

B

So any time where we're writing uh webassembly actors with wasm cloud now you can have it be uh hot watched or hot reloaded and any changes that you make are automatically updated and you can just continue to develop and hit a really small developer feedback loop. The only thing we need is the path to the signed actor.

B

This could technically be relative, but just because it has to be relative to where you start the host, we recommend using an absolute path, and this is because things in the browser don't know where things are or your browser doesn't know where things are on your local file system, which is a good security measure, but just to make this a little bit easier. Thankfully, steve has included a great make target called target path, absolute or abs. That will give you the full absolute path to your actor or provider on disk.

B

Now, if we just copy that come back to the come back to the dashboard, we can start up a couple of different couple. Replicas of our kv counter actor go ahead and hit submit we'll spin up 10 instances, and you can see that it's got a fancy new status of hot reloading and then also this little fire action which you can use to stop hot reloading at any time.

B

Now the actor is just running, there's nothing different in terms of how it's running in the host. It's just the mechanism when you build how it can be replaced. So let's go ahead and define our links here so that we can actually link our actor to the http server and the kb redis provider.

B

So we'll run this on port 8081 and we can connect our kb counteractor to our redis provider with the wasmcloud key value contract, and we just need to get it the give it the redis connection string.

B

So once we do that, if we come over to this other tab that I've got and we hit refresh boom, we get a counter. We hit refresh a couple more times, I'm just incrementing that counter over and over. So this is exactly what our business logic is asking for, but say we wanted to change this right say we either want to make a modification or you know, you're developing an actor from scratch. So this just is like an mvp.

B

What we can go ahead and do is come back to our vs code window over here and let's make like a a really simple change. If, if we just didn't think that counter was descriptive enough, we can do something really verbose like counter that we got from the database right. We can. We can save that we run make and then go back to our washboard.

B

We can see if we watch this the status here you may, if you blink, you may have missed it rapidly, scaled down and up from 0 to 10 and now we're waiting for the status again if we go hit our endpoint wow. This is the counter that we got from the database so almost immediately as soon as the rust build finishes, you pretty much. Can it auto scales those actors down and up loads, the new ones in, and you can continue testing now.

B

If we, this is the the make step, isn't doing anything magic here, it's just building and signing the actor and putting it in the same place that uh we're hot watching so anytime, there's going to be a change there, we're going to automatically replace that for you now, that's obviously a little um a little bit of an extreme example for for changing the payload. So we can change that back.

B

We can run make and go ahead and replace our actors back again and if we, if we refresh, then we just get that counter right away now this is really powerful, because it's essentially um you know we're replacing 10 actors in under 10 seconds running. Make here there's a couple of things that we can do to make this even cooler. So say we have another change right. We wanted to change the amount. You know we have some logic in here that we can include an amount in the payload and increment it by more than one.

B

Let's say we just change that to something like I'll do. 15 is a little weird we'll do. Let's just do 100 100 is nice and easy to keep track of. We can make a little change, um and this is something that I found in when doing the example.

B

When we had wash hot reloading, you can set up a vs code task, and you can do this in any ide, almost certainly like a build task that you run when you save or with a hotkey, and I've got this build task just to run, make whenever I use the build hotkey. So that's control shift b for me, so I just made that little change.

B

If I do control shift b, you see this just kind of loads, really quick for a second and then all of our actors get replaced if we hit this endpoint we're incrementing by a hundred so effectively once you start hot reloading this actor, the uh the the changing your business logic to actually being able to test. It is really under 10 seconds. You know, making making a change here by incrementing a different amount in the counter, or even if we wanted to change the the key here so like we have a prefix called counter.

B

If we wanted to, you know, version our keys or something like that, we can change the key run, the build task as soon as that's done. We scale down scale up. We can hit this and we're starting again from a new counter, because we've changed the the key, so I really just wanted to show off how powerful this is.

B

How much? I think that this is going to improve the developer experience, and it's worth noting that you know in this process. Any kind of compilation, error or something that you're going through would happen before the hot reloading would even take place.

B

So it's it's pretty resilient against against issues when you're running into like developing a new um developing, a new actor from from a template, we're not you're not going to like accidentally run a broken actor or something like that, and then of course you know changing things back is really simple: again, you can save run the run, the build task and- and you know right away- these things are automatically replaced so anyways that was, uh that was the the hot reloading demo.

B

We can go ahead and stop hot reloading there, and and from now on we're not going to be um we're not going to be watching that file for changes as long as we're happy with our business logic, so anyways really excited for, um for you all to start start playing with this, I'm going to be going through and updating our documentation so that this can actually be included there and and you'll get a chance to you'll, get a chance to experiment it with it.

B

If you were just going through the getting started tutorial, for example, um well anyways thank you for sitting through my demo and if you have any questions about it, feel free to just go in the wasmcloud channel on our slack and tag me if you're watching this from youtube, you can you can send me a tweet too, that works fine, all right, bye, everyone, happy holidays.

C

I love everything about this feature. um I'm I'm absolutely going to use this non-stop.

A

D

A

The old timers.

D

Amazing I mean like compare that to building out a container and reloading it. That is pretty good. Well, that's.

C

Actually, amazing, so it's it's even faster than it looks because when washboard says awaiting uh the actor's actually ready to go, um it's actually a bug and washboard that isn't displaying the right status. So those actors are ready to go like faster than you can hit. Alt tab.

A

uh Jeannie, can I put that quote on our website. The load time is amazing here to building and reloading a container all right, all right. Thank you. I'm gonna come back and.

E

Crib that stuart sorry go ahead. I I was just it's absolutely amazing, and it's really really gonna help. I guess the next great thing would be providers was he was he providers that we can do the same thing with right.

E

I suppose that's a ways away.

A

Yeah, we have experimental thoughts on that, but that's nowhere close yeah, you know um kevin has been working um and thinking through some performance testing. That's somewhat tangential to this uh jennifer to kind of respond to your speed and we've got a big tech company. That's you know using moz and cloud and we're kind of helping them. You know scale scale and whatnot, and um one of the interesting things that we're working to define with them is how much better this is, and so we're doing like how many actors can you load in the memory?

A

What are what's the footprint of the guest, and I hope that we take that work and kind of publish it out there, because it is, the numbers are better than an order of magnitude. You know, like you know, we're now part.

C

A

It is is that it's always a little bit of um you know like any comparison, is always somewhat weighted, because you know we're comparing against java spring boot applications that take four to eight gig per container and we're comparing them to lots of factors that are. You know, 20 kilobytes. You know or something like that, and you know it's almost just not fair um uh on there yeah.

C

This morning I was running a test um of the the wise cloud host in debug mode and was able to load a thousand actors into it and still consume slightly less than two gigs of ram.

E

Yeah, it's a whole nother world, especially when a spring boot um java in a container and kubernetes can, you know, take 45 seconds to get going and it's like whoa yeah.

A

Well, um that's just a really phenomenal feature and a huge uh congratulations to regular brooks. If you do happen to watch this video later to see how your demo went, I think it was an absolute home run.

A

um I know that we are on a holiday eve here in the united states uh with thanksgiving, um so I absolutely wanted to start by opening the floor or actually let me first ask steve with the short week: we we probably don't, have a sprint plan or anything like that to share. I know we um uh were you know we had some call outs that I could do a few but I'll hand the mic to you. First perhaps.

F

Sure um yeah, actually we've got a few uh um wash updates coming uh coming soon and I think brooke stemmed the context feature last week, but um there's also a new capability provider we're working on so some cool updates coming up in the next uh over the next month. Okay,.

A

Awesome, um the only uh call that I would add is is that um the community calls to action have been phenomenal and we actually are just burning those down and we need to invest some time and make sure that we call out a few more so to those users like blake, for example, that have been working on those uh just greatly appreciated, uh and um uh thank you so much for being a part of this quickly growing community.

A

So we'll make sure we take some time and continue to define those and continue to make a great road map to help to grow this community to be the most diverse and inclusive community. We can be so. We built the best um application runtime for webassembly with wasn't cloud. Just any open call outs um around. If not, I've got some marketing stuff did anyone else have anything they want to bring up.

A

Hey justin, well marketing wise. We are working on a event in dc uh that is nominally in partnership with ffrdc a federally funded research and development center. So that will be public. So just watch for more information about that over the next few weeks, as we get them on the schedule, I'm trying to get it done early uh or in december, but it may very well slip till a january on just dates and logistics for the reservation it'll be likely in tyson's corner of virginia um at mitre um is what we're working through.

A

A planning is already underway for kubecon eu. So we're going to try to slow down the submission date again this year to give folks more time to get great demos on the table, as always we're most interested in user stories and community webassembly stuff.

A

But planets are already underway for valencia, spain and I hope to see as many of you out there as possible any other community college we'd want to make at this time.

A

All right the open floor, anyone else not I'll, go and stop recording. We can go and hang out like usual, go and stop now. Thank you so much and have a happy thanksgiving for those in the u.s and have a wonderful week for everyone else.

A