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WASM-Native Orchestration

wasmcloud.com

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Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#41

Post by pjmlp »

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, just like you could do with CLR back in 2001.

"More than 20 programming tools vendors offer some 26 programming languages — including C++, Perl, Python, Java, COBOL, RPG and Haskell — on .NET. "

-- https://news.microsoft.com/2001/10/22/massive-industry-and-d...

Same old, sold with a rebranded package.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#42

Post by nilslice »

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…

pretty sure https://taubyte.com does just this

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#43

Post by brooksmtownsend »

pookeh wrote: post #24
thesurlydev wrote: post #21

Taking a quick look around on their website it seems you can have them host for you or self-host but absolutely requires k8s. If I'm wrong, point me to the doc that shows you how to self-host without k8s and I'll officially be excited.

It doesn’t require k8s — you run their agent binary on multiple hosts and they all get connected. You can deploy the same agent in k8s also if you want.

Yep that's right, we do not require k8s. There's a ton of existing infrastructure into k8s so we try to make it apparent how you integrate there. The local CLI, wash, is an example of how we run locally, it's just a Windows/Mac/Linux binary and then the WebAssembly components are architecture/OS agnostic.

We use NATS to connect distributed hosts and manage distributed state (e.g. no etcd) so as long as you can connect the NATS servers you can run anywhere.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#44

Post by brooksmtownsend »

remram wrote: post #35
Shadowmist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Wasm gives lots of benefits and as a project in a new-ish ecosystem we like to tout it and our goals as being a Wasm-native orchestrator. I think in general though nobody should care about running Wasm at all, just like you shouldn't really care about running containers. The goal is to write code and then ship it, the unit of compute is irrelevant. All that being said obviously Wasm isn't a drop-in replacement for containers, but we're working on more and more use cases where you can use them instead. As a developer I don't want to worry about base containers and vulnerabilities outside of my code and cross-compilation and then have to think about Kubernetes of all things at the end of the day

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#45

Post by remram »

brooksmtownsend wrote: post #44
remram wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Wasm gives lots of benefits and as a project in a new-ish ecosystem we like to tout it and our goals as being a Wasm-native orchestrator. I think in general though nobody should care about running Wasm at all, just like you shouldn't really care about running containers. The goal is to write code and then ship it, the unit of compute is irrelevant. All that being said obviously Wasm isn't a drop-in replacement for co…

> Wasm gives lots of benefits

Again, such as what?

And if that is true, why aren't some of them listed on the site? Instead of listing the advantages of wasmCloud compared to wasm no-cloud?

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#46

Post by brooksmtownsend »

srameshc wrote: post #8

Too much marketing fluff on the website. How about showing simple example as how is it easier or useful to deploy some service to fly.io , AWS or GCP or maybe a Postgres deployment to Digital Ocean, Render or whatever. I want to use it but before I want to know how can I move my dependency from managed XYZ and easily run/manage my own deployment of databas, services.

It sounds obvious when you say it, and I appreciate the feedback! Marketing fluff is nice for messaging, but we'll take a look at getting comparison examples more front-and-center.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#47

Post by brooksmtownsend »

jcmfernandes wrote: post #7
diggan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so wasmCloud is like Kubernetes, but then I don't understand their tagline: "Build, manage, and scale Wasm apps across any cloud, K8s, or edge" or the "Run wasmCloud standalone or on Kubernetes" part. Why would you want to run a orchestrator (wasmCloud) on top of another orchestrator (Kubernetes)? Are they competitors? No, then it wouldn't make sense to run it on Kubernetes, so that makes them complements?

You use k8s to manage the machines where wasmCloud runs, and wasmCloud to manage the WASM apps that run on top of it. That's at least my understanding.

That's what people do in enterprises because they have security controls and processes around k8s with too much investment. It's a no-go telling people to "just run this binary on this VM/baremetal machine", understandably.

We've got a few examples on our website from users that (in my opinion) use wasmCloud more for its strengths as a distributed computing platform. Often there's central k8s infrastructure where wasmCloud runs and connects to wasmCloud hosts running on edge devices. https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2024-10-22-webassembly-adoption-t....

Me personally, I run all my side projects off of a wasmCloud binary on Oracle's always free tier instance and it's been pretty awesome.

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#48

Post by zackangelo »

I've been developing on top of wasm (wasmtime, specifically) for several years now.

I personally have my doubts about how broadly the components specification (which this cloud platform seems to depend on) will be adopted. Maybe I'm just not very smart, but it feels like one of the things I loved the most about WebAssembly, its simplicity, is being lost.

To get even basic things done with WASI, you now have to figure out which flavor to pull in (preview 1, preview 2, ... need any async [0], that's coming preview 3?), learn a new IDL language [1] that defines the component's spec, figure out its codegen toolchain [2]. It's all very reminiscent of COM, CORBA and all the other times this has been tried in the past.

In any case, wasmtime is an amazing project and I'm grateful for it. They've already had to bifurcate the library to support WASI and components. I just hope non-WASI/component code retains its status as a first class citizen in the project.

[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MNVOZ8hdofO3tI0szg_i... [1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des... [2] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen

Re: WASM-Native Orchestration

#50

Post by digdugdirk »

turizzmo wrote: post #26
digdugdirk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for putting me on to Protocol Labs! It's a wealth of super cool projects.

Protocol Labs here — are you familiar with Fluence or Bacalhau projects? Those might be good starting points.

Thank you! So glad you responded, Fluence seems to be very much along the lines of what I'm thinking.

Is there a good entry point to understanding the project that you can recommend? The website is drenched in crypto-speak, and I'm very much outside of that community. Just looking for an overview/white paper to be able to get my bearings before digging deeper.

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