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WASM-Native Orchestration

wasmcloud.com

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Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#31

Post by beeflet »

digdugdirk wrote: post #12

Question for everyone - I've long wondered if it would be possible to use WASM to create a p2p "cloud" to reduce reliance on datacenters? My thought would be to encrypt all data packets prior to shuffling them into the network, and have some sort of incentive for people to keep their devices running on the network to enhance reliability - probably with a blockchain of sorts that serves as the main "map" of content in…

The new freenet has some interesting ideas related to this in the form of "contracts" and "delegates", which are essentially distributed WASM programs with their own memory. It sounds a lot like what you're describing: https://docs.freenet.org/components/contracts.html

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#32

Post by brooksmtownsend »

Hey! I’ve been a maintainer of wasmCloud since 2019, I’m glad it sparked some interest and I appreciate the time spent going through the docs and QuickStart.

I’ll have to take another look and answer questions when I’m at the keyboard tomorrow! Appreciate all the feedback here, it’s really helpful to hear the fresh perspectives

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#33

Post by remram »

Being similar to Kubernetes is nice and makes sense if your audience is familiar with Kubernetes but I can't grasp the advantage over Kubernetes. If you have to run agents on machines and pull artifacts from OCI registries, why not pull containers?

I can see clearly what you lose but not what you gain.

Their entire site seems to be "you want to run WASM apps and we're a great way to do that". But do I want to run WASM apps? Does anyone?

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#34

Post by Shadowmist »

remram wrote: post #33

Being similar to Kubernetes is nice and makes sense if your audience is familiar with Kubernetes but I can't grasp the advantage over Kubernetes. If you have to run agents on machines and pull artifacts from OCI registries, why not pull containers? I can see clearly what you lose but not what you gain. Their entire site seems to be "you want to run WASM apps and we're a great way to do that". But do I want to run WAS…

These people do https://landscape.cncf.io/?group=wasm

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#35

Post by remram »

Shadowmist wrote: post #34
remram wrote: post #33

Being similar to Kubernetes is nice and makes sense if your audience is familiar with Kubernetes but I can't grasp the advantage over Kubernetes. If you have to run agents on machines and pull artifacts from OCI registries, why not pull containers? I can see clearly what you lose but not what you gain. Their entire site seems to be "you want to run WASM apps and we're a great way to do that". But do I want to run WAS…

These people do https://landscape.cncf.io/?group=wasm

What I'm saying is that running WASM isn't an objective in itself. Just like running containers. Their site should tell me why I want to run WASM because I don't think I do.

Also your page is a list of things that support WASM, not ones that prefer or even value WASM (especially WASM outside the browser...)

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#36

Post by intelVISA »

diggan wrote: post #3

I feel like this landing page has so many buzzwords I don't quite understand what the application/project itself is, but I do understand it's universal, runs everywhere and can run anything anywhere. Could someone who knows what it is, give a simpler description? Is it a OS/kernel? Runtime? Orchestrator? Self-hosted platform? Cloud platform?

It's a grift as far as I can tell.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#37

Post by zeroq »

(I see in the comments that more people have similar concerns)

ELI5 why is this not a solution looking for a problem? Not even this particular project, but WASM as a platform in general.

My point of view is that contenerization is the final step in reaching the "serverless" nirvana. Having a Docker (or similar) solves a platitude of problems, everyone develops in the same environment, deployment is fully reproducible and isolated, and so on.

I'm not a fan of pure "serverless" solutions as they hide too much moving parts inside a magic box.

Why is WASM seen as the next step?

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#38

Post by riquito »

zeroq wrote: post #37

(I see in the comments that more people have similar concerns) ELI5 why is this not a solution looking for a problem? Not even this particular project, but WASM as a platform in general. My point of view is that contenerization is the final step in reaching the "serverless" nirvana. Having a Docker (or similar) solves a platitude of problems, everyone develops in the same environment, deployment is fully reproducible…

Since you're asking for WASM in general.

How do you run a Python program using docker in the browser?

How do you run a Ruby function from a Scala library with docker?

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#39

Post by zekrioca »

zeroq wrote: post #37

(I see in the comments that more people have similar concerns) ELI5 why is this not a solution looking for a problem? Not even this particular project, but WASM as a platform in general. My point of view is that contenerization is the final step in reaching the "serverless" nirvana. Having a Docker (or similar) solves a platitude of problems, everyone develops in the same environment, deployment is fully reproducible…

You might be thinking that container is similar to a VM, but it is not. WebAssembly is suppose to be something akin to a universal “web ISA” (Instruction set architecture with its own assembly instructions, thus, “WebAssembly”) which all modern browsers support. This means that technically, one is able to compile a binary once and run anywhere, something that is not entirely possible with containers.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#40

Post by mirekrusin »

tootie wrote: post #18
mirekrusin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it starts to be interesting because wasm modules are so lightweight it opens interesting ways of orchestration. Each node can easily have copy of every deployed module. Having modules locally means you can skip network and just call functions in memory directly. Startup time is also tiny. Scaling by replication is so efficient that it becomes a whole new thing (on demand, extremely high upper limits, write ea…

I'm reading docs and barely following what actual mechanism is involved to enable any of the stuff they are selling. Am I correct in reading that this is like a modern version of the JVM with WASM in place of bytecode? So I can compile Python or Go or whatever into WASM and wasmcloud provides a portable runtime? So instead of packaging an entire containers worth of OS primitives, it's runtime with an API?

yes

there are couple of things also

ie. wasm modules can be published and consumed to/from oci registries, which is nice

this linking is interesting also - ie. in docker you don't dynamically load other container to import functionality, but with wasm you can and because they're small you can architect your system around independent modules that use each other directly

they use nats for comms

and you can probably run your orchestrated system in browser - may sound silly but it's interesting capability as well

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