Cloud Native Wasm Day 2021

The system interfaces we use today were designed in the 70s and 80s to power the systems that were prevalent at that time. But increasingly what a "system" even is, is much more open-ended. They include distributed applications spanning the cloud and edge networks, tiny IoT devices scattered throughout our homes, or platforms that embed sandboxes to run untrusted code. 

With the WebAssembly System Interface, we’re building a new kind of system interface to better support these kinds of systems. And with this shift, new opportunities are opening up.

In this talk, I’ll explain what all of this means for Cloud Native and some of the opportunities that could be unlocked.

WebAssembly is not only changing the way we build and deploy software, but it can improve every aspect of the developer experience from napkin sketch to deployment. In this session, Kevin takes you on a trip from application concept (the "napkin") all the way to production in the cloud (and beyond!). He will illustrate the process of building a full-featured, cloud-native application composed of polyglot actors (Rust and Go!) using the open source project wasmCloud. You'll learn how this journey changes for the better in so many ways simply by embracing the power and--even the limitations--of WebAssembly. You'll see how what you build in isolation on your workstation can grow in scale, performance, and resiliency, all without ever having to re-architect components, consume hard-to-use remote services, or recompile a complex chain of dependencies. Ship your napkin to production!

Michael Yuan will discuss options to run Tensorflow model inference on WebAssembly. Using a Mobilenet image classification task as an example, he will cover the plain JS approach, Tensorflow.js, pure Rust libraries for Tensorflow, and WASI-like Tensorflow extensions that run on specialized inference chips. The session will go through the journey of 60,000x performance gain over the evolution of WebAssembly. He will also discuss what’s the future for WebAssembly-based AI on the edge cloud.

Almost one year ago, our team released Krustlet, a Kubernetes Kubelet implementation for running WASM modules. Since then, we’ve spent plenty of time out on the frontier, implementing full Kubernetes functionality for WASM as well as other experiments like WAGI. Along the way, we’ve seen all the rough edges and gaps when using WASM in the cloud. Using these project as a practical backdrop, we’ll discuss the lessons we’ve learned and the remaining gaps to be filled (and how you can participate!) in order for WASM to become more mainstream.

WebAssembly was born as portable bytecode to run in browsers, but it is now much more than that. Many out-of-browser environments for running WebAssembly have emerged, including proxy-wasm, Krustlet, and WASI.

Why is WebAssembly gaining a presence outside the browser?
The key lies in the fact that WebAssembly has multiple advantages that were not previously available, especially safeness and openness.

In this talk, I will summarize what features of WebAssembly are giving rise to a wide variety of applications in the world outside the browser, and reflect on how "WebAssembly outside the browser" is a great idea and its impact on application security.

Serverless function-as-a-service is popular among developers. Public clouds use hypervisor VMs or containers (e.g., Docker) to run serverless functions. But they are slow and resource-intensive. In this talk, Michael will discuss the Wasm VM as a lightweight cloud-native runtime. It allows serverless functions to be embedded in edge & IoT devices, as well as in SaaS platforms. It also enables developers to deploy serverless functions on legacy systems without changing any code. Topics include: * How to create a function-as-a-service with Node.js & Wasm * How public clouds like Tencent Cloud utilized Wasm in serverless environments * How to use K8s and cloud-native tools to deploy & manage Wasm VMs Developers will get hands-on experience to create & deploy high-performance serverless functions in Rust.

14:00 - 14:10 CEST
Lightning Talk: Migrating from JS to WASM in production and living to tell the tale - Corentin Godeau, Lumen 
Here at Lumen, we develop software to help video streaming platforms scale to millions of viewers and provide top-notch quality to audiences. As video streaming soared last year, we embarked on a journey to improve the performance of one of our core offerings - a client-side CDN load balancer. In this talk, we explain how we migrated our legacy JavaScript codebase into C++ targeting WASM for the web. We discuss how we overcame the differences in paradigm between JS and WASM. We explore the constraints WASM presented when ensuring compatibility with native and how that shaped our code architecture. We also look at the tooling we used to debug the code that went into production and share some practical insights into memory management and the battle scars that you can avoid if you plan to take on this kind of project yourself.

14:10 - 14:20 CEST
Lightning Talk: Building web services for a future based on WebAssembly - Connor Hicks, 1Password
In this talk, Connor will dive into Atmo, an open source framework designed for building cloud native applications using WebAssembly modules. Atmo is enabling developers to build their applications with the popular patterns of serverless computing, while harnessing the power and security of WebAssembly. Connor will show how WebAssembly makes it easier to deploy an application to the cloud by demonstrating Atmo's unique development patterns, easy to use APIs, and straightforward deployments. Connor will also be providing extensive example code and a deep dive into what makes WebAssembly the next iteration of cloud software development.

14:20 - 14:30 CEST
Lightning Talk: Build trusted cloud apps with Wasm: WebAssembly Micro Runtime is ready - Xin Wang, Intel
It is critical to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of user code and data on the cloud and the solutions often rely on the CPU Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) feature such as Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX). Wasm introduced a new approach for abstracting workloads from the underlying TEE HW differences. WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR), a Bytecode Alliance open source project has provided comprehensive support for Intel SGX, such as compiled Wasm modules, WASI, TensorFlow, and it has made an excellent adoption trend on SGX by open-source projects and commercial products. This talk will introduce the WAMR architecture and key features, as well as its usages on cloud TEE such as Smart Contract, Multi-parties computing. It will also share how the projects like Inclavare, Faasm use WAMR to orchestrate Wasm workloads for smoothly extending to cloud TEE.

14:30 - 14:40 CEST
Lightning Talk: Storing WebAssembly Modules with Bindle - Matt Butcher & Taylor Thomas, Microsoft
In this presentation we introduce Bindle, a technology for distributing collections of WebAssembly modules. We will talk about supply chain security, distributing nanoprocess-based applications (including wasmCloud), secure proxying, and dynamically assembling applications based on host capabilities. Bindle is designed to move beyond plain object storage. It can describe applications as graphs, where the application can be assembled at runtime based on the constraints and capabilities of the host. An embedded device may favor performance and speed of thoroughness. A server may run an application with a web frontend, while a phone may render it using a native windowing solution. Bindle provides a way to describe these characteristics so that the client can assemble the right collection of WebAssembly binaries to execute optimally.

Serverless functions are a cost-effective way to build scalable APIs, but they can be impractical for certain applications due to cold starts and lack of support for your language of interest. However, now that several platforms offer FaaS solutions powered by WebAssembly (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastly), they can now provide near-0 function initialization times, and support for languages that compile to WebAssembly. This talk explores how to use serverless WebAssembly to build APIs for compute-intensive workloads. As a concrete example, Robert will showcase a serverless function that performs bioinformatics analysis; this is done by compiling an existing library from C to WebAssembly, and deploying it as a serverless function.

Web Assembly provides an ideal portable form of deployment for machine learning models. Although a whole machine learning framework could be potentially compiled into Wasm, special hardware acceleration is often needed in order to be performant, which is difficult to do within Wasm with the limited support of parallelism. WASI-NN is a Web Assembly System Interface (WASI) module that allows for near-native performance on a variety of devices such as CPU with AVX512, GPU, TPU, and FPGA. In this talk, we will present the WASI-NN interface design and a reference implementation in Wasmtime. We will provide a step-by-step guide and a demo on how to build all relevant components, and write an image classification application with sample code in Rust and AssemblyScript. We will also demonstrate the performance advantages of WASI-NN over alternative approaches.

Looking forward to the intersection of cloud, 5G, and IoT we are poised on the precipice of the next era of computing. In this talk Liam outlines the opportunities to drive the software and infrastructure of the near future - find out why the CNCF and Wasm are better together!

WebAssembly filters allow users the power to extend and customize Istio to their liking. But how do organizations actually develop them? Tooling exists for traditional software development, but established methods and tooling are difficult to come by in the emerging WebAssembly ecosystem. In this talk we will attempt to answer the following, based on our experience working Istio + WebAssembly in customer environments for over one year: How do we write WebAssembly filters? How do we test WebAssembly filters? How do we debug WebAssembly filters? How do we ship WebAssembly filters? We will explore existing tooling and solutions for working with WebAssembly in the service mesh, and provide insight into the development processes being implemented by early adopters of WebAssembly.

Most will be familiar with the CNCF Landscape graphic, which is full of tremendous tools and platforms. Sometimes that density of possibilities can be daunting. Come "sit down" with some of the leading lights of WebAssembly usage in the cloud native space to create a brand new landscape diagram from scratch about cloud native possibilities with WASM and the forthcoming WASI. Lots of thoughts, fun, and new possibilities about which to speculate.

Additional registration is required for this session and will close 24-hours prior to the session start time. Please register HERE if you would like to participate. Registrants must also be registered for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 Virtual to attend. A meeting link will be shared with all registered participants prior to the session start time. 

Pre-registration closes May 3, 16:00 Central European Standard Time (CEST).

Sponsored by:
Microsoft Azure