e2core VS gvisor

> If one writes Go or Rust, there are much better ways to run them than targeting WASM

wasm has its place, especially for contained workloads that can be wrapped in its strict capability boundaries (think, file-encoding jobs that shouldn't access anything else but said files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29112713).

> Containers are still the defacto standard.

wasmedge [0], atmo [1], krustlet [2], blueboat [3] and numerous other projects are turning up the heat [4]!

[0] https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge

[1] https://github.com/suborbital/atmo

[2] https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet

[3] https://github.com/losfair/blueboat

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30155295

One of the first things we've used it for internally is to run one-off isolated tests on WebAssembly modules instead of feeding them through a production Atmo[0] instance. It basically serves as a dumb pipe for feeding data in and out of a Wasm module.

0: https://github.com/suborbital/atmo

Excited to see Atmo on there 🙂 https://github.com/suborbital/atmo

My open source focus for this year is building Atmo, and there is one aspect of the process that I would like to highlight. Since early 2020 I knew roughly what I wanted to build. The specifics of that thing changed over time, but the core idea of a server-side WebAssembly platform was consistent all throughout the year. I didn't write a single line of code for Atmo until late October, even though that was what I wanted to build the entire time. I want to talk about why.

I am also open to any and all contributions from the community. I am more than happy to meet with anyone interested in working alongside me to build these capabilities so that I can help get you started developing Atmo, Vektor, Grav, Hive, and Subo. Developers with no experience working with WebAssembly, distributed systems, web services, or Go are encouraged to join and I will do whatever I can to help you learn what's needed to contribute. Open Source is not just about developing in the open, it's also about helping others learn.

With SUFA systems, multiple ASGs are created, each designated as a capability group. Each capability group is given access to the resources required for the associated function namespace to operate (such as the datastore or secrets), and can then scale independently of one another. Since the application's functions are decoupled entirely from one another, it's possible for some functions to run on the host that receives the request, and functions from particular namespaces to be meshed into other capability groups. A SUFA framework such as Atmo is responsible for handling the meshed communication, completely absorbing the complexity.

The SUFA pattern was designed in concert with Atmo, which is an all-in-one framework upon which SUFA systems can be built. Atmo uses a file known as a 'Directive' to describe all aspects of your application, including how to chain functions to handle requests. You can write your functions using several languages to be run atop Atmo, as it is built to use WebAssembly modules as the unit of compute. Atmo will automatically scale out to handle your application load, and includes all sorts of tooling and built-in best practices to ensure you're getting the best performance and security without needing to write a single line of boilerplate ever again.

Isn't gVisor kind of this as well?

"gVisor is an application kernel for containers. It limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application while still giving the application access to all the features it expects. Unlike most kernels, gVisor does not assume or require a fixed set of physical resources; instead, it leverages existing host kernel functionality and runs as a normal process. In other words, gVisor implements Linux by way of Linux."

https://github.com/google/gvisor

This sort of feels like seeing someone riding a bike and saying: why don’t they just get a car? The simple fact is that containers and VMs are quite different. Whether something uses VMX and friends or not is also a red herring, as gVisor also “rolls it own VMM” [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/pkg/sentry/plat...

There's two major production-ready Go-based operating system(-ish) projects:

- Google's gVisor[1] (a re-implementation of a significant subset of the Linux syscall ABI for isolation, also mentioned in the article)

- USBArmory's Tamago[2] (a single-threaded bare-metal Go runtime for SOCs)

Both of these are security-focused with a clear trade off: sacrifice some performance for memory safe and excellent readability (and auditability). I feel like that's the sweet spot for low-level Go - projects that need memory safety but would rather trade some performance for simplicity.

[1]: https://github.com/google/gvisor

[2]: https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

It uses gVisor to create a TCP/IP stack in userspace, and starts a wireguard interface on it, which the HTTP server from http.Serve listens on. The library will print a URL after startup, where you can access your server. You can create multiple listeners in one binary.

The playground compiles the program with GOOS=linux, GOARCH=amd64 and runs the program with gVisor. Detailed documentation is available at the gVisor site.

You could use a container sandbox like gVisor, light virtual machines as containers (Kata containers, firecracker + containerd) or full virtual machines (virtlet as a CRI).