hippo VS runwasi

You may laugh, but a few years ago all those guys who sold us (some of? us - me anyway) on Kubernetes evidently got bored with it, and now they're all building a Hippo Factory[1]. And it's actually really good. This is the current timeline!

[1] https://docs.hippofactory.dev/

WebAssembly (Wasm) is something that the Cloud Native Advocacy team has been exploring. It has been around for a few years and has mostly been used within browser-based applications. There are many blog posts on what makes WebAssembly an ideal target for running applications (e.g., smaller footprint with .wasm files compared to containers, code isolation, and sandboxing). My colleague Steven Murawski wrote a blog series on getting started with hosting Wasm apps on an emerging PaaS platform called Hippo which is developed by folks at Fermyon. In Part 1 of the series, he introduces topics and define some of the acronyms like "Wagi" and "WASI". He also introduced a runtime called Wasmtime which implements the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) standard. This article will walk you through how Steven and I went about getting a .NET console app running as a Wasm app on the Wasmtime runtime in a Dev Container. The .NET console app produced in this article has also been contributed as a csharp template in the yo-wasm repo which is also maintained by Fermyon; so you can quickly test it out for yourself later.

cpu: 4 disk: 60 memory: 12 arch: host hostname: colima autoActivate: true forwardAgent: false # I only tested this with 'docker', not 'containerd': runtime: docker kubernetes: enabled: false version: v1.24.3+k3s1 k3sArgs: [] network: address: true dns: [] dnsHosts: host.docker.internal: host.lima.internal # Added: # - containerd-snapshotter: true (meaning containerd will be used for pulling images) docker: features: buildkit: true containerd-snapshotter: true vmType: vz rosetta: true mountType: virtiofs mountInotify: false cpuType: host # This provisioning script installs build dependencies, WasmEdge and builds the WASM runtime shims for containerd. # NOTE: this takes a LOOONG time! provision: - mode: system script: | [ -f /etc/docker/daemon.json ] && echo "Already provisioned!" && exit 0 echo "Installing system updates:" apt-get update -y apt-get upgrade -y echo "Installing WasmEdge and runwasi build dependencies:" # NOTE: packages curl, git and python3 already installed: apt-get install -y make gcc build-essential pkgconf libtool libsystemd-dev libprotobuf-c-dev libcap-dev libseccomp-dev libyajl-dev libgcrypt20-dev go-md2man autoconf automake criu pkg-config libdbus-glib-1-dev libelf-dev libclang-dev libzstd-dev protobuf-compiler apt-get clean -y - mode: user script: | [ -f /etc/docker/daemon.json ] && echo "Already provisioned!" && exit 0 # # Setting vars for this script: # # Which WASM runtimes to install (wasmedge, wasmtime and wasmer are supported): WASM_RUNTIMES="wasmedge wasmtime wasmer" # # Location of the containerd config file: CONTAINERD_CONFIG="/etc/containerd/config.toml" # # Target location for the WASM runtimes and containerd shims ($TARGET/bin and $TARGET/lib): TARGET="/usr/local" # # Install rustup: # echo "Installing rustup for building runwasi:" curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh -s -- --default-toolchain none -y source "$HOME/.cargo/env" # # Install selected WASM runtimes and containerd shims: # [[ -z "${WASM_RUNTIMES// /}" ]] && echo "No WASM runtimes selected - exiting!" && exit 0 git clone https://github.com/containerd/runwasi echo "Installing WASM runtimes and building containerd shims: ${WASM_RUNTIMES}:" sudo mkdir -p /etc/containerd/ containerd config default | sudo tee $CONTAINERD_CONFIG >/dev/null for runtimeName in $WASM_RUNTIMES; do case $runtimeName in wasmedge) echo "Installing WasmEdge:" curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge/master/utils/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -p $TARGET echo echo "`wasmedge -v` installed!" ;; wasmtime) echo "Installing wasmtime:" curl -sSfL https://wasmtime.dev/install.sh | bash sudo cp .wasmtime/bin/* ${TARGET}/bin/ rm -rf .wasmtime echo "`wasmtime -V` installed!" ;; wasmer) echo "Installing wasmer:" curl -sSfL https://get.wasmer.io | sh sudo cp .wasmer/bin/* ${TARGET}/bin/ sudo cp .wasmer/lib/* ${TARGET}/lib/ rm -rf .wasmer echo "`wasmer -V` installed!" ;; *) echo "ERROR: WASM runtime $runtimeName is not supported!" exit 1 ;; esac cd runwasi echo "Building containerd-shim-${runtimeName}:" cargo build -p containerd-shim-${runtimeName} --release echo "Installing containerd-shim-${runtimeName}-v1:" sudo install ./target/release/containerd-shim-${runtimeName}-v1 ${TARGET}/bin sudo ln -sf ${TARGET}/bin/containerd-shim-${runtimeName}-v1 ${TARGET}/bin/containerd-shim-${runtimeName}d-v1 sudo ln -sf ${TARGET}/bin/containerd-shim-${runtimeName}-v1 ${TARGET}/bin/containerd-${runtimeName}d echo "containerd-shim-${runtimeName} installed." cd .. echo "[plugins.\"io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri\".containerd.runtimes.${runtimeName}]" | sudo tee -a $CONTAINERD_CONFIG >/dev/null echo " runtime_type = \"io.containerd.${runtimeName}.v1\"" | sudo tee -a $CONTAINERD_CONFIG >/dev/null done echo "containerd WASM runtimes and shims installed." # # Restart the systemctl services to pick up the installed shims. # NOTE: We need to 'stop' docker because at this point the actual daemon.json config is not yet provisioned: # echo "Restarting/reloading docker/containerd services:" sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl restart containerd sudo systemctl stop docker sshConfig: true mounts: [] env: {}

I wish Go had (real) enums.

https://github.com/containerd/runwasi/blob/ba5ab5ada5a401762...

On Windows the shim is called runhcs (io.containerd.runhcs.v1).

The docker solution mentioned in the article modifies the "wasmtime" shim from https://github.com/containerd/runwasi so that it uses "wasmedge" instead.

Instead of serving it inside a container, I would like to run it as WASM module (if that makes sense, I'm very new to WASM. Maybe this a silly idea). The reason for this is to check out reduced instantiation time and effortless multi-arch support (no need to build container image for every arch), for example using the wasmedge runtime: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/wasm/. I currently manage the container through Kubernetes (among other things), and I'm considering runwasi as containerd shim: https://github.com/containerd/runwasi.