Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nWebAssembly<\/a> (WASM) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Though initially designed for the web browser [see 1], it can be used in applications outside the web. One particular use case which is of interest to us is the use of wasm in a serverless context, the advantage of this being is the ability of WASM to support different languages and compile down to a lightweight runnable entity which is in principle portable across different processors\/platforms. Also, WASM is designed as being safe, efficient and fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRunning WASM in Serverside Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nAlthough WASM support for many languages is ongoing via extensions to widely used compilers, we observed issues working with Golang and ended up focusing on C\/C++ and Rust for the purposes of this work. A list of supported languages can be found here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nC\/C++ code can be compiled to wasm using either Emscripten <\/a>or Clang with wasm32-wasi<\/a>\n compilation tags. Having a WASM binary of course is not enough \u2014 a \nmeans to run it on the native processor is also required. In this work, \nwe looked at two approaches: one based on using a WASM runtime which \nmaps from WASM instructions to native processor instructions during \nexecution and an alternative which is based on a priori compiling the \nWASM executable to native processor instructions. Wasmer<\/a>, Wasmtime, <\/a>and Lucet<\/a>\n were considered here \u2014 the former two are runtimes which execute an \narbitrary WASM binary; the latter compiles the WASM binary to native \ncode. A full list of WASM runtimes can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTo see how these different approaches perform we compared performance using a simple primes benchmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/files\/2020\/03\/1vuxZoroK6ElNKEaYV3vkjw.png\")
The graph shows the time taken to find the largest prime number in max_int.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nHere\n we see that Wasmer’s performance is similar to Lucet, both performing \nfaster than Wasmtime. We performed a number of other comparisons using \nmemory bound and compute bound computation and this conclusion largely \nheld across all the experiments we performed. For this reason, as well \nas the fact that it has a substantial developer interest We choose to go\n ahead with using Wasmer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Edit: Till Schneidereit from the bytecode alliance reached out to note that Wasmtime\u2019s performance was due to optimizations being disabled by default<\/a> in previous versions of Wasmtime.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nRunning WASM in Serverless Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nIn\n most of today\u2019s serverless contexts, functions run in docker \ncontainers. For this reason, we investigated how to run serverless \nfunctions easily in docker containers \u2014 in principle, these could be \ndeployed on arbitrary serverless platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\n first looked at the possibility of using OpenWhisk which allows running\n Docker containers [see 6]. One disadvantage is that the container needs\n to be uploaded publically <\/a>to\n Docker Hub and openwhisk requires that the container runs a service \nwhich exposes specific endpoints. We used a basic python-flask based \nservice which triggered the wasmer runtime and the wasm application \n-this approach had the undesirable side effect of generating a large \ncontainer image. However, we managed to get it working even with this \nlarger container image.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile\n investigating the docker based approach, we found that it is possible \nto invoke WASM functionality directly from the Node.js runtimes \navailable on the different serverless platforms. [see 7], this is useful\n since Node is supported by most Serverless platforms. We did a simple \nbenchmark by computing fibonacci N = 42.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/files\/2020\/03\/1h14eNQoIG4GGPCFEXy0_0w.png\")
Comparison of serverless and native platforms running fib42<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAs\n time was running out, we were unable to perform a very comprehensive \nanalysis of the relative merits of the Docker solution and the Node.js \nsolution. However, we did perform a basic comparison in which the WASM \nbased function was invoked in different ways as shown in Figure 2. We \nobserved that the Node.js solution works better than the Docker \ncontainer in the scenarios we explored. However, one draw-back of the \nNode solution is that it only supports data types of ints <\/em>at the moment. We did not manage to find an explanation for the slow run time on AWS was not found during the research.<\/p>\n\n\n\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe\n project produced a performance comparison of different solutions for \nrunning wasm on the server side and then considered how wasm can be \ndeployed to different serverless platforms (AWS and Openwhisk). We found\n that NodeJS had some advantages over a Docker based solution \u2014 better \nperformance, easier packaging etc. However, there could be other \nbenefits from a Docker based solution, eg better integration with \nexisting serverless platforms. Ultimately, we believe it is likely that \nsupporting native WASM within the serverless platform will be a \nrequirement without the need for encapsulating them within Docker \ncontainers. In any case, this technology is still in the early days of \nits evolution and there remain many interesting issues to be explored \nand addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quick Links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n- WebAssembly with Go<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling C to wasm and running on Wasmtime<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling C to wasm and running on Lucet<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling Rust to wasm<\/a><\/li>
- Putting Wasmer binary into a Docker Container<\/a><\/li>
- Creating an OpenWisk compliant Docker Container<\/a><\/li>
- Using Node.js to deploy wasm on Serverless<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\nSchlagw\u00f6rter: aws<\/a>, openwhisk<\/a>, serverless<\/a>, wasm<\/a>, webassembly<\/a>
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Note This post was first published on Medium by Leonardas (Badrie) Persaud – one of the students who was involved in this project. The post is republished here as the project was run within the context of the Software Maintenance and Evolution course run by Sebastiano and the project itself was supervised by Se\u00e1n. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,50,8,141,142],"features":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-aws","tag-openwhisk","tag-serverless","tag-wasm","tag-webassembly"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Running WASM in Serverside Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nAlthough WASM support for many languages is ongoing via extensions to widely used compilers, we observed issues working with Golang and ended up focusing on C\/C++ and Rust for the purposes of this work. A list of supported languages can be found here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nC\/C++ code can be compiled to wasm using either Emscripten <\/a>or Clang with wasm32-wasi<\/a>\n compilation tags. Having a WASM binary of course is not enough \u2014 a \nmeans to run it on the native processor is also required. In this work, \nwe looked at two approaches: one based on using a WASM runtime which \nmaps from WASM instructions to native processor instructions during \nexecution and an alternative which is based on a priori compiling the \nWASM executable to native processor instructions. Wasmer<\/a>, Wasmtime, <\/a>and Lucet<\/a>\n were considered here \u2014 the former two are runtimes which execute an \narbitrary WASM binary; the latter compiles the WASM binary to native \ncode. A full list of WASM runtimes can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTo see how these different approaches perform we compared performance using a simple primes benchmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe graph shows the time taken to find the largest prime number in max_int.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nHere\n we see that Wasmer’s performance is similar to Lucet, both performing \nfaster than Wasmtime. We performed a number of other comparisons using \nmemory bound and compute bound computation and this conclusion largely \nheld across all the experiments we performed. For this reason, as well \nas the fact that it has a substantial developer interest We choose to go\n ahead with using Wasmer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Edit: Till Schneidereit from the bytecode alliance reached out to note that Wasmtime\u2019s performance was due to optimizations being disabled by default<\/a> in previous versions of Wasmtime.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nRunning WASM in Serverless Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nIn\n most of today\u2019s serverless contexts, functions run in docker \ncontainers. For this reason, we investigated how to run serverless \nfunctions easily in docker containers \u2014 in principle, these could be \ndeployed on arbitrary serverless platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\n first looked at the possibility of using OpenWhisk which allows running\n Docker containers [see 6]. One disadvantage is that the container needs\n to be uploaded publically <\/a>to\n Docker Hub and openwhisk requires that the container runs a service \nwhich exposes specific endpoints. We used a basic python-flask based \nservice which triggered the wasmer runtime and the wasm application \n-this approach had the undesirable side effect of generating a large \ncontainer image. However, we managed to get it working even with this \nlarger container image.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile\n investigating the docker based approach, we found that it is possible \nto invoke WASM functionality directly from the Node.js runtimes \navailable on the different serverless platforms. [see 7], this is useful\n since Node is supported by most Serverless platforms. We did a simple \nbenchmark by computing fibonacci N = 42.<\/p>\n\n\n\nComparison of serverless and native platforms running fib42<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAs\n time was running out, we were unable to perform a very comprehensive \nanalysis of the relative merits of the Docker solution and the Node.js \nsolution. However, we did perform a basic comparison in which the WASM \nbased function was invoked in different ways as shown in Figure 2. We \nobserved that the Node.js solution works better than the Docker \ncontainer in the scenarios we explored. However, one draw-back of the \nNode solution is that it only supports data types of ints <\/em>at the moment. We did not manage to find an explanation for the slow run time on AWS was not found during the research.<\/p>\n\n\n\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe\n project produced a performance comparison of different solutions for \nrunning wasm on the server side and then considered how wasm can be \ndeployed to different serverless platforms (AWS and Openwhisk). We found\n that NodeJS had some advantages over a Docker based solution \u2014 better \nperformance, easier packaging etc. However, there could be other \nbenefits from a Docker based solution, eg better integration with \nexisting serverless platforms. Ultimately, we believe it is likely that \nsupporting native WASM within the serverless platform will be a \nrequirement without the need for encapsulating them within Docker \ncontainers. In any case, this technology is still in the early days of \nits evolution and there remain many interesting issues to be explored \nand addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quick Links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n- WebAssembly with Go<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling C to wasm and running on Wasmtime<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling C to wasm and running on Lucet<\/a><\/li>
- Compiling Rust to wasm<\/a><\/li>
- Putting Wasmer binary into a Docker Container<\/a><\/li>
- Creating an OpenWisk compliant Docker Container<\/a><\/li>
- Using Node.js to deploy wasm on Serverless<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\nSchlagw\u00f6rter: aws<\/a>, openwhisk<\/a>, serverless<\/a>, wasm<\/a>, webassembly<\/a>
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Note This post was first published on Medium by Leonardas (Badrie) Persaud – one of the students who was involved in this project. The post is republished here as the project was run within the context of the Software Maintenance and Evolution course run by Sebastiano and the project itself was supervised by Se\u00e1n. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,50,8,141,142],"features":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-aws","tag-openwhisk","tag-serverless","tag-wasm","tag-webassembly"],"yoast_head":"\n
Experimenting with WebAssembly in a Serverless context - Service Prototyping Lab<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Experimenting with WebAssembly in a Serverless context\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Note This post was first published on Medium by Leonardas (Badrie) Persaud – one of the students who was involved in this project. The post is republished here as the project was run within the context of the Software Maintenance and Evolution course run by Sebastiano and the project itself was supervised by Se\u00e1n. The […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Service Prototyping Lab\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-03-16T12:34:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-03-18T05:53:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/files\/2020\/03\/1vuxZoroK6ElNKEaYV3vkjw.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Sean Murphy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Sean Murphy\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Sean Murphy\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/#\/schema\/person\/c87a6eef7e1f4a152aeec5f8b9527b8d\"},\"headline\":\"Experimenting with WebAssembly in a Serverless context\",\"datePublished\":\"2020-03-16T12:34:08+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-03-18T05:53:25+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\"},\"wordCount\":928,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/files\/2020\/03\/1vuxZoroK6ElNKEaYV3vkjw.png\",\"keywords\":[\"aws\",\"openwhisk\",\"serverless\",\"wasm\",\"webassembly\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Research\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/splab\/2020\/03\/16\/experimenting-with-webassembly-in-a-serverless-context\/\",\"name\":\"Experimenting with WebAssembly in a Serverless context - 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C\/C++ code can be compiled to wasm using either Emscripten <\/a>or Clang with wasm32-wasi<\/a>\n compilation tags. Having a WASM binary of course is not enough \u2014 a \nmeans to run it on the native processor is also required. In this work, \nwe looked at two approaches: one based on using a WASM runtime which \nmaps from WASM instructions to native processor instructions during \nexecution and an alternative which is based on a priori compiling the \nWASM executable to native processor instructions. Wasmer<\/a>, Wasmtime, <\/a>and Lucet<\/a>\n were considered here \u2014 the former two are runtimes which execute an \narbitrary WASM binary; the latter compiles the WASM binary to native \ncode. A full list of WASM runtimes can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To see how these different approaches perform we compared performance using a simple primes benchmark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\n we see that Wasmer’s performance is similar to Lucet, both performing \nfaster than Wasmtime. We performed a number of other comparisons using \nmemory bound and compute bound computation and this conclusion largely \nheld across all the experiments we performed. For this reason, as well \nas the fact that it has a substantial developer interest We choose to go\n ahead with using Wasmer<\/p>\n\n\n\n Edit: Till Schneidereit from the bytecode alliance reached out to note that Wasmtime\u2019s performance was due to optimizations being disabled by default<\/a> in previous versions of Wasmtime.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In\n most of today\u2019s serverless contexts, functions run in docker \ncontainers. For this reason, we investigated how to run serverless \nfunctions easily in docker containers \u2014 in principle, these could be \ndeployed on arbitrary serverless platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\n first looked at the possibility of using OpenWhisk which allows running\n Docker containers [see 6]. One disadvantage is that the container needs\n to be uploaded publically <\/a>to\n Docker Hub and openwhisk requires that the container runs a service \nwhich exposes specific endpoints. We used a basic python-flask based \nservice which triggered the wasmer runtime and the wasm application \n-this approach had the undesirable side effect of generating a large \ncontainer image. However, we managed to get it working even with this \nlarger container image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While\n investigating the docker based approach, we found that it is possible \nto invoke WASM functionality directly from the Node.js runtimes \navailable on the different serverless platforms. [see 7], this is useful\n since Node is supported by most Serverless platforms. We did a simple \nbenchmark by computing fibonacci N = 42.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As\n time was running out, we were unable to perform a very comprehensive \nanalysis of the relative merits of the Docker solution and the Node.js \nsolution. However, we did perform a basic comparison in which the WASM \nbased function was invoked in different ways as shown in Figure 2. We \nobserved that the Node.js solution works better than the Docker \ncontainer in the scenarios we explored. However, one draw-back of the \nNode solution is that it only supports data types of ints <\/em>at the moment. We did not manage to find an explanation for the slow run time on AWS was not found during the research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n project produced a performance comparison of different solutions for \nrunning wasm on the server side and then considered how wasm can be \ndeployed to different serverless platforms (AWS and Openwhisk). We found\n that NodeJS had some advantages over a Docker based solution \u2014 better \nperformance, easier packaging etc. However, there could be other \nbenefits from a Docker based solution, eg better integration with \nexisting serverless platforms. Ultimately, we believe it is likely that \nsupporting native WASM within the serverless platform will be a \nrequirement without the need for encapsulating them within Docker \ncontainers. In any case, this technology is still in the early days of \nits evolution and there remain many interesting issues to be explored \nand addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note This post was first published on Medium by Leonardas (Badrie) Persaud – one of the students who was involved in this project. The post is republished here as the project was run within the context of the Software Maintenance and Evolution course run by Sebastiano and the project itself was supervised by Se\u00e1n. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,50,8,141,142],"features":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-aws","tag-openwhisk","tag-serverless","tag-wasm","tag-webassembly"],"yoast_head":"\nRunning WASM in Serverless Context<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Quick Links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"