wasmCloud Community, 20 Apr 2022

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From YouTube: wasmCloud: wash Update Released, TinyGo Actor Support, CodeGen Discussion - 04/20/22

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.

https://wasmcloud.com

A

All right welcome everybody to the wasmcloud community meeting wednesday april 20th. um I am alt liam. I mean brooks townsend so and I'll be running the meeting today, um but first we have kind of a new community member in here uh shiyu. Would you like to go ahead and introduce yourselves.

B

Sure uh I'm shi uh I'm actually from huawei technologies, and one of my friends is investigating uh the wasn't worthy thing, and I find it very interesting- and I heard this awesome cloud community from him and he recommended me attending this meeting on behalf of him today. uh Yeah that's about me.

A

Awesome well, thank you. Thank you for doing an introduction and grad glad to have you here.

B

A

um So to start, we normally go with with some kind of demo to begin our community meetings, um and I don't have a demo for you today, but I have something that was important, that I wanted to talk about, because it was kind of a milestone release. I guess so just this past week or earlier this week we released wash 0.10, and so this mostly, what I want to call out here, is that there is a there's, a breaking change in the way that we acknowledge control interface commands.

A

So you know for, for example, what we'll do is uh thanks to a great pr from um from matt wilkinson. Now, when you start an actor or start a capability provider, you can actually wait for those resources to fully start. You wait for the actor started or the provider started event coming out of the host.

A

You can always add the dash dash skip dash, wait, flag or the skip weight flag in order to skip that act, but this is really nice for when you're writing scripts, and you want to make sure that each resource starts before you move on to the next thing. So just keep an eye out for that, but in general, we've got some new features, some some fixes- and I really just wanted to call out matt wilkinson, blake uh orver uh evan who's on the call now and jordan.

A

For for some awesome contributions to this release, I mean it's like 90 of the um new things in this came from community members. Like you.

C

D

A

We really appreciate that so please go out and give it a try, and that is pretty much what I wanted to talk about with wash um now next, just for a um general uh for the for the community call out section. This is where we normally pull in a couple of good first issues, um things that people can get started working on for wasmcloud. I have two today one is with wash there's this.

A

There's this notion of context and wash where, when you start, a host will be able to wash is able to automatically infer the connection parameters. You know any authentication that you use to authenticate to mats. So when you start a host on your local machine by default, wash is going to automatically connect to that host lattice, and this is.

D

A

With developing locally, because especially when you're using authenticated gnats connections, you don't have to specify a ton of different authentication parameters, um but in the case where we fail to deserialize one of these json contexts.

A

At the moment we kind of just um we. We fail gracefully right, we're not going to crash the whole program, because you don't need to use context in order to use wash.

A

um So this is why we avoided putting like a worn log saying that we couldn't deserialize it, because you don't need to use context, but in general, would be great to debug here for for debugging here to say, if you're not using a context, just to make sure that you don't have a malformed context, then the second issue for our good first issues list is a bug in the host.

A

Runtime and kevin actually filed this a little bit earlier right now, when we're scheduling duplicate capability providers, you can only run one essentially combination of public key and link name for a capability provider on a host at a time- and this is this is intentional, and this is still being enforced. The the host doesn't allow you to run multiple, um but we're we're kind of handling. We could handle this a little bit better.

A

We should be able to in the provider auction section not allow you to auction a capability provider to a host that already has one running and additionally, when we try to start an already running provider, we should warn say that the provider failed to start, but it right now. We essentially attempt to start that provider anyways, which will um which will which will crash. So we can handle this a little bit more gracefully.

A

We kind of already have a to-do in the code for tackling this, which is why I think it's a great a great first issue. There's there's pointers, and so, if anybody's interested in taking on either of these just drop a comment on the issue, and if you have any questions, I am happy to answer them now or there's always the help channels in lawson cloud.

A

So does anybody have any questions for the community call out or for the wash release.

A

Awesome uh well then, now what we can go ahead and do is move on to our I know: that's our community call out for the wasm cloud community, but for the general, broader wasm community, and for the folks that are here.

A

I have one thing that I wanted to mention, which is here in about 15 minutes, the red badger. Folks, one of our one of our great partners are putting on their. We love tech conference and this topic is we love nats and we at wasmcloud also love maps. We run that's under the hood for a lot of our networking and remote procedure calls, and so that's going to be here.

A

I know it says uh it's 6 30 in london or in the uk, but then it'll be at 1 30 eastern time and the registration and attendance is free. So please feel free to um come. Take a look at this I'll drop, the link in the chat- and I think a lot of us on the wasom cloud side are going to migrate over there whenever this wraps up so it'd be great to see other folks there as well.

A

Does anybody else have any, let's see a stewart on here? No he's, probably you know running the conference. um Anybody else have anything for the general wasm or wasn't cloud community, really anything free form open. Now.

A

D

I know um it was released this week, but taylor did a blog post about um embedded static assets inside of a webassembly actor, which I think he is going to demo next week, he's on a call right now, so he couldn't make it. But that may be worth just pointing people out in case they want to check it out.

A

Yeah thanks for bringing that up liam, I um that that slipped my mind yeah. We have a new new blog post on the cosmonaut site for for running your ui on lawson cloud, um and uh this is something that taylor wrote up and taylor pioneered the engineering of this. But it's you know what it started with our pet clinic example.

A

We were still running uh our react app essentially in a container to serve static assets um and not ideal, and- and we found that and what what taylor found is that we can package um package these assets into webassembly modules and completely.

D

A

The container part of our pet clinic application, so um I won't spoil the whole thing. It's a it's. A great quick read that taylor wrote up. I dropped that link in the chat, so I would highly recommend that.

C

Brooks if you, if you can, maybe you can also show the github address or the github page for tiny, go actor support. Oh yeah.

A

A

Kevin you want to talk through this a little bit.

C

um Yeah sure, maybe just go into the example and uh and show that one yeah, uh so the the basic idea is we we support uh tiny, we support actors written in tinygo, and so you can compile your tiny go modules to webassembly and then run them in the wasmcloud host right now. The the message pack serialization and deserialization stuff is all being done by hand uh but fairly soon.

C

We should we hope, to have uh code generation support, so you'll be able to use your your smithy files to generate either rush types or tiny go types.

A

Awesome yeah. I know that a very common question that we get is is bringing on additional language support. I know jordan is on the call now and he's a um I'd say. A little bit of a go fan definitely been looking for that um for a little while. So this is great to see yeah.

C

I mean we should definitely give give credit where credit is due. uh A lot of the the code. That's in here came from examples that jordan built.

A

I can't find the emote, so I gotta clap in person, so thank you, jordan.

A

All right, um kevin uh uh jordan said in the chat he gave up go for php.

A

um Well, this is awesome um and looking forward to, I haven't actually gotten to try this out um myself, but this is great.

A

All right: um well, that's a lot of exciting stuff that I kind of glossed over a little bit serving ui from wasmcloud and uh preliminary tiny ghost support for for wilds and cloud actors which is really exciting. um Does anybody else have anything else, interesting, evan? I know that you were working on something about fly.io for for than like the nets, networking plan under wasn't cloud how's that coming along.

E

It's actually gone really: well, they they post. They are they're a heavy consumer of gnats to gossip, some information for networking and routing and ports available within their services. There's a really wonderful, blog post. They have out on on how they use nats, but they also posted some examples of how to deploy a nat's cluster within fly, and so I kind of took that example and started tweaking on it a little bit and realized holy crap.

E

I have gnats that I can get to from like anywhere in the us with low latency, that is, uh that is intriguing, even if it's just the gnats part of it, and so probably my next steps are going to be similar to, I think, what's been posted in in architecture before by you guys having a routing layer of http servers and fly within flies.

E

Regions which span the globe would be pretty interesting because it would mean we could serve an actor through and close to wherever someone may be, which is an incredible boost to latency for some applications and obviously it's something that more of the proprietary groups already have. But yeah, it's like edge deployed watson, seems kind of interesting.

A

That's pretty cool you'll have to um you'll, have to let us know how that's going and whenever you get like a little poc of it.

D

A

Us know before the community call you: can we we'll slide you in the demo section.

E

That'd be great yeah yeah. I would want to get something more concrete, though yeah.

A

Yeah, I did a little bit of experimenting with like gnats all over the place, um for the talk that I did today um at devops day in atlanta, which is why I'm in random hotel room um and it's really cool, looking how quick things can move along.

A

um I think I posted in the watson cloud channel about that, like going from like airport wi-fi over to like my house in dc, where I'm running the google coral like out to a database in texas and everything- and it is- you know around a quarter of a second to to do all that. It's amazing yeah, I'm interested to see you know, fly I o, as has their whole value proper on latency I'd be interested in. Comparing that to you know, I'm using ngs the nas global service.

A

I bet they're comparable, but I'm really interested to see what how it differs.

E

Yeah I mean I slammed into it with uh with oracle free tier arm, four cores in ashburn, and I posted fly routes and ashburn dfw and lax and really good latency.

E

I got straight up gig speed between between nodes on a trivial nats bench, so feasibly a message gateway. That would allow me to do that, but also you know the inside outside transfer costs of cloud or a factor but intriguing. Nonetheless,.

A

Yeah, that's really neat. You can connect it to get pod. You can do all the all the things.

E

Yep dev it all without even letting it touch a local right, yep.

A

All right um well, uh unless anybody else has something for the open floor, um you know speak now or forever hold your peace. uh I I can go ahead and uh in the recording and we can get on to just hanging out before the before the next conference.

A

All right. Thank you. Everyone.

C

D

Happens at the end of every call, I'm sitting on the beach with pina colada in hand, and this is interesting to me. So you know I mean so we were talking about, go actor, support and a code generation. I think, in addition to some of the uh like what our experience was with a flight at io. I think that's awesome. Let's, let's pick back up there, yeah yeah.

A

Okay, um uh I'm gonna end. The community call thanks everybody for for coming and hanging out. Oh evan, great question tiny, go support for for um smithy and the the code jen, um so yeah anyways. We wanted to pick up the conversation because we always end up with some cool stuff um and our, uh I guess, a tldr of what I just said: everybody's going to be bored, because I'm going to say it again, all of the cogen that we've been doing for rust actors and rust capability providers.

A

You know that's coming from smithy interfaces, which is language agnostic. The tooling that we've been writing has been keeping.

D

A

That we're going to be first class supporting things like tiny, go and other web assembly languages in the future.

A

So now that we've gotten rust to a certain amount of maturity, we're really looking at um and experimenting experimenting with our interfaces to a certain amount of security, really interested in taking a leap for for a next couple of languages to get that first class was cloud support because for you know it ever since we've started you've been a you can technically write a wasn't cloud actor in any language that can, um you know, read uh something from oh, you know that's capability providers in any language they can compile to a freestanding wasm file, but the cogen really gives that removed.

A

Boilerplate experience, abstracting away some of the things that um are core to interacting with the watson cloud runtime.

A

um Kevin or kevin evan did you have. um I know you said you had some things that you're really interested in like.

E

A

E

Yeah, like so wanna, so I've got a I've, got a colleague that I'm gonna be meeting in the next week who works on a language called green that compiles to wasm.

E

Like I'm curious what the code gen path would look like, because I kind of dive through some of the smithy idl and looked at, and it looked like in the past you'd even code gend.

E

I guess a subset python or something like python to do an actor development in python, and I thought boy there are some really great simplified languages out there that I don't have to onboard somebody to learning rust.

E

That would be great cogen targets right, like just pure actor development, not providers, just just actors right.

C

Yeah we uh we definitely agree there. I think um so. One of the reasons why tinygo is there is because it's nice and easy for people to use, but also a big fan of grain and the code gen for grain would look similar to the way it looks for it will look for tiny go where 90 of the work is going to be in generating uh the data types, and I don't know off hand what the message pack uh data encoding round trip story looks like ingrained. That would probably I mean that's. That's.

E

A good first start, though,.

C

Yeah, probably the limiting factor is um being able to round trip data types in messagepack. Once you can do that, um grain should be ready to roll.

E

Yeah- and I mean it's- got the raw buffer and bytes primitives- that kind of get at that, but yeah the serialization deserialization doesn't exist for message pack, probably not the case probably have to roll that yeah. Okay, so I'll start there I'll see. If I'll look at message back serialization see if it's possible one.

C

Of the things that I would one of the things that I would have been waiting to be able to use and we're not really there yet once webassembly has like a decent component model type, what we could do is, you know, generate the message pack round trip code, dump it into a wasm file and then have your grain code refer to the wasm file that contains the deserialization stuff, uh and you know, merge the two together and that way you wouldn't actually have to write the the message pack stuff in grain.

C

You could, you know, treat the other wasm vial like a uh like a library.

E

Oh okay, all right.

C

But that's that's not possible today, but hopefully one day we'll have some some stuff where we can kind of stitch together, multiple different wasm components.

E

A

Yeah, I think I think back when we were looking at um or like back in the 0.18 world with with assembly script support. Didn't we have to like assembly script, didn't have great message pack support at the time, I believe, like. I think we.

C

Yep um phil phil keady wrote the uh message pack library for assembly script and it's still basically the the the go-to library for message pack stuff on assembly scripts and the same is actually true for our tiny go stuff. We're using um we're using phil's message pack, because the the other message pack library that I found for tiny go crashes. All the time has build problems so.

C

Yeah, like I said there are two hurdles to overcome when building when trying to make uh something work as an actor for wise and cloud. The first is: can you produce a freestanding webassembly module, that's pretty easy for certain languages like rust, and you know c, plus, plus, and things like that, and obviously grain and assembly script. But then the next hurdle is. Can you round trip message pack payloads.

E

That's it yeah, that's a good starting point. I think I'll start start there and see what I can find yeah.

A

Yeah keep us updated and we're happy to kind of help. We're happy to help out in that department, because yeah grain and assembly script, like the purpose, build webassembly languages, are, are really interesting. uh Support.

A

Especially assembly script, you know it's not really typescript, um but the typescript, like syntax, is so much more approachable. For so many people, who've done javascript or done typescript before getting people in the door is really a lot easier with that.

A

All right, this is the part of the meeting where I pretend to end it, and then someone else comes out with an awesome question and then we can keep it going.

A

Okay, I'm gonna stop it, but nobody better come up with a good uh good topic after we.

B