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The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

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Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#31

Post by mikesir87 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #21
mikesir87 wrote: post #4

Michael Irwin from Docker here (and author of the blog post too). Happy to answer your questions, hear feedback, and more!

Why would I want to compile my app to WASM if it's not running in a browser?

Great question! The promise (and excitement) of Wasm is to have portable, secure, quick-to-start, and low resource usage apps. So, write code in Go, Rust, C++, or any other language that can output to Wasm (up to over 40 now!) and you're good to go! The binaries are super small too. Happy to dive in more too!

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#32

Post by [deleted] »

gigel82 wrote: post #2

Insert "BUT WHY?" GIF here. Seriously, if you're in a position to be running native code in your environment why would you chose WASM? If you're building WASM for the web, is it really more expensive to build a pure native target out of the same source? Surely, performance wise you'll always be ahead going native.

[deleted]

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#33

Post by [deleted] »

nateabele wrote: post #9

Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…

[deleted]

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#34

Post by nateabele »

timanglade wrote: post #16
nateabele wrote: post #9

Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…

Broadly, we agree. The goal of this Technical Preview is not to encourage Wasm to be mediated by containers in production, but rather to enable people to locally build & package Wasm apps easily. In production, that could look like a number of different scenarios, from "bare metal" edge (just running in a Wasm VM), to running your Wasm workloads in a nomad/k8s cluster if that’s what you need (e.g. if you want hybrid…

Hey Tim, I appreciate your willingness to engage. What I'm getting at is a bit more pointed. In terms of composability, Docker and WASM are opposites: Docker requires a stand-alone runtime, and an orchestration layer, etc., whereas a WASM module & runtime can be embedded directly into my application, into a browser, or into (comparatively) simple, time-tested tools like Apache[0].

So, to your point, the opportunity here is to provide WASM-native alternatives to existing container-specific technologies, that are more composable by design, because they don't have to deal with the complexity of trying to ape an extra operating system just to run some software.

For example, I'd love to see container orchestration be supplanted by something like a la carte Erlang-style service discovery—that's a primitive that could easily be composed with other primitives, and wouldn't result in the combinatorial explosion of nouns we see in systems like k8s / Swarm / others.

[0] https://github.com/vmware-labs/mod_wasm

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#35

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #33
nateabele wrote: post #9

Apologies in advance for a bit of a rant, but I sincerely hope the tools growing up around WASM significantly diminish the need for Docker. As an industry, we're so bad at isolation that we have to put a computer (container) inside a computer (VM) inside a computer (hardware) just to achieve any sort of sane guarantees. Then we immediately trade any semblance of sanity for container orchestration. (And please don't t…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#37

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #32
gigel82 wrote: post #2

Insert "BUT WHY?" GIF here. Seriously, if you're in a position to be running native code in your environment why would you chose WASM? If you're building WASM for the web, is it really more expensive to build a pure native target out of the same source? Surely, performance wise you'll always be ahead going native.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#38

Post by petilon »

mikesir87 wrote: post #14
petilon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem is this solving?

Depends on which "this" you're referring to. We (Docker) are trying to make it easier for developers to use the tools and capabilities they know and love to build, share, and run Wasm applications. As far as Wasm itself, it's designed to provide a fast, lightweight, secure, and portable binary format. While it was originally designed to help bring native code to the browser, it's quickly spreading to the server side.…

I didn't get anything from that. My question was not about WASM but Docker+WASM project. Why problem does it solve?

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#39

Post by syrusakbary »

This is great. We’ve been chatting with Docker for a little bit (I’m Syrus, from Wasmer) and it’s great to see that they are making progress on improving the developer experience around WebAssembly.

However, I see Docker (and thus, Kubernetes) is as technologies of the past (I don’t intend to start any flamewar, I really believe this by heart). Metal compute (Web 1.0) lead to VMs which then lead to Containers (Web 2.0 / Cloud) and now we are seeing what the next wave will look like thanks to WebAssembly.

Of course, there’s ton of profit that has been generated thanks to the added complexity of current technologies and abstractions.

We have now the opportunity to rethink what the future will look like. Long live Wasm

Re: The Docker+WASM Technical Preview

#40

Post by screamingninja »

pistoriusp wrote: post #22
mikesir87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! There isn't a way to run Docker directly in the browser. But, there are tools (like Play with Docker at play-with-docker.com) that lets you interact with a CLI in the browser to run commands against a remote cloud instance. I personally use this a lot for demos and workshops! But... certainly a neat idea to think about what Wasm-based applications could possibly look like/run in the browser!

Hey! Peter from Snaplet here. This is really exciting stuff. We created the OSS postgres-wasm ( https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm ) example a few weeks ago. An idea I'm playing around with is something like: 1. Visit https://postgresql.com/try?version=14.x 2. Visit https://nodejs.com/try?version=16.15.1 3. Visit https://edit.com Edit.com opens a text-editor and terminal where I have access to the NodeJS binary…

All three links that you posted appears to be either broken or malicious. Are you just trying to explain a concept using example domain names? Consider ".example" or ".example.com" (see RFC 2606) instead of potentially malicious domains.
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