spawner VS wasmtime

For the “jhub but for any container that speaks HTTP” use case, you might find our Spawner project interesting: https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner

We don’t have a good story for volumes yet, but I’m open to ideas.

Is the appeal of isolates in this case the cold start time or the isolation? We're working on some open source infrastructure for running sandboxed (gVisor) containers on the fly from web services[1], and one of the use cases people have is serving Jupyter notebooks which seems like it might resemble your use case?

[1] https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner/

yes! a fellow HN user e-mailed me about his project "Spawner"

https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner

check out the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGsxxcQRKa4

Drifting in Space | Full-time | NYC | https://driftingin.space

We make Jamsocket (https://jamsocket.com/), which allows application developers to spin up and connect to server-side compute. This allows browser-based applications to do computationally-intensive things that are otherwise impossible in the browser.

We went through YC and just raised a seed round and are looking to build up our team. We are based in NYC but are open to remote for experience candidates.

Our tech stack includes Rust, NATS, Docker, Postgres, TypeScript. We have lots of fun technical problems that get into the nitty-gritty of networking and operating systems. We are excited to build a diverse team and encourage non-traditional candidates to apply.

Email [email protected] or see more details here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/drifting-in-space/jobs...

Hi HN, we’re Paul and Taylor, and we’re launching Drifting in Space (https://driftingin.space). We build server software for performance-intensive browser-based applications. We make it easy to give every user of your app a dedicated server-side process, which starts when they open your application and stops when they close the tab.

Many high-end web apps give every user a dedicated connection to a server-side process. That is how they get the low latency that you need for ambitious products like full-fledged video editing tools and IDEs. This is hard for smaller teams to recreate, though, because it takes a significant ongoing engineering investment. That’s where we come in—we make this architecture available to everyone, so you can focus on your app instead of its infrastructure. You can think of it like Heroku, except that each of your users gets their own server instance.

I realized that something like this was needed while working on data-intensive tools at a hedge fund. I noticed that almost all new application software, whether it was built in-house or third-party SaaS, was delivered as a browser application rather than native. Although browsers are more powerful than ever, I knew from experience that industrial-scale data-heavy apps posed problems, because neither the browser or a traditional stateless server architecture could provide the compute resources needed for low-latency interaction with large datasets. I began talking about this with my friend Taylor, who had encountered similar limitations while working on data analysis and visualization tools at Datadog and Uber. We decided to team up and build a company around solving it.

We have two products, an open source package and a managed platform. Spawner, the open source part, provides an API for web apps to spawn a session-lived process. It manages the process’s lifecycle, exposing it over HTTPS, tracking inbound connections, and shutting it down when it becomes idle (i.e. when the user closes their tab). It’s open source (MIT) and available at https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner.

Jamsocket is our managed platform, which uses Spawner internally. It provides the same API, but frees you from having to deal with any cluster or network configuration to ship code. From an app developer’s point of view, using it is similar to using platforms like Netlify or Render. You stay in the web stack and never have to touch Kubernetes.

Here's an example. Imagine you make an application for investigating fraud in a large transaction database. Users want to interactively filter, aggregate, and visualize gigabytes of transactions as a graph. Instead of sending all of the data down to the browser and doing the work there, you would put your code in a container and upload it to our platform. Then, whenever a fraud analyst opens your application, you hit an API we provide to spin up a dedicated backend for that analyst. Your browser code then opens a WebSocket connection directly to that backend, which it uses to stream data as the analyst applies filters or zooms/pans the visualization.

We're different from most managed platforms because we give each user a dedicated process. That said, there are a few other services that do run long-lived processes for each user. Architecturally, we're most similar to Agones. Agones is targeted at games where the client can speak UDP to an arbitrary IP; we target applications that want to connect directly from browsers to a hostname over HTTPS. In the Erlang world, the OTP stack provides similar functionality, but you have to embrace Erlang/Elixir to get the benefits of it; we are entirely language-agnostic. Cloudflare Durable Objects support a form of long-lived processes, but are focused on use cases around program state synchronization rather than arbitrary high-compute/memory use cases.

We have a usage-based billing model, similar to Heroku. We charge you for the compute you use and take a cut. Usage billing scales to zero, so it’s approachable for weekend experiments. We have not solidified a price plan yet, but we’re aiming to provide an instance capable of running VS Code (as an example) for about 10 cents an hour, fractionally metered. High-memory and high-CPU backends will cost more, and heavy users will get volume discounts. Our target customers are desktop-like SaaS apps and internal data tools.

As mentioned, our core API is open source and available at https://github.com/drifting-in-space/spawner. The managed platform is in beta and we’re currently onboarding users from a waitlist, to make sure that we have the server capacity to scale. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to sign up for it here: https://driftingin.space.

Have you built a similar infrastructure for your application? We’re always interested in hearing the approaches people have already taken to this problem and learning what their pain points are.

Just a documentation change, fortunately:

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/commits?author=...

They've submitted little documentation tweaks to other projects, too, for example:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/overview/whats-new-cpp...

I don't know whether this is a formerly-legitimate open source contributor who went rogue, or a deep-cover persona spreading innocuous-looking documentation changes around to other projects as a smokescreen.

WebAssembly is extremely portable. WebAssembly runs on: all major web browsers, V8 runtimes like Node.js, and independent Wasm runtimes like Wasmtime, Lucet, and Wasmer.

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: {}

When you say wasm container, you mean something like wasmtime that provides a non-browser wasm runtime?

https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

We can't run this directly from the command line unless we install some runtime like wasmtime:

The roadmap I linked above. The WASI folks have done a poor job at communicating, no doubt, but I'm surprised someone like yourself literally building a competitor spec isn't following what they are doing closely.

Just for you I did some googling: see here[0] for the current status of WASI threads overall, or here[1] and here[2] for what they are up to with WASI in general. In this PR[3] you can see they enabled threads (atomic instructions and shared memory, not thread creation) by default in wasmtime. And in this[4] repository you can see they are actively developing the thread creation API and have it as their #1 priority.

If folks want to use WASIX as a quick and dirty hack to compile existing programs, then by all means, have at it! I can see that being a technical win. Just know that your WASIX program isn't going to run natively in wasmtime (arguably the best WASM runtime today), nor will it run in browsers, because they're not going to expose WASIX - they're going to go with the standards instead. so far you're the only person I've met that thinks exposing POSIX fork() to WASM is a good idea, seemingly because it just lets you build existing apps 'without modification'.

Comical you accuse me of being polarizing, while pushing for your world with two competing WASI standards, two competing thread creation APIs, and a split WASM ecosystem overall.

[0] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/jco/issues/247#issuecomm...

[1] https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/wasmtime-and-cranelift...

[2] https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/webassembly-the-update...

[3] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/pull/7285

[4] https://github.com/WebAssembly/shared-everything-threads

Thanks for the question!

Spin could definitely run in more places than what we have pre-built binaries for. Specifically, we could run on all platforms Wasmtime supports today (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/releases/tag/v1...), including RISC and S390X, for example.

And while we have been experimenting a bit with running Spin on RISC, we haven't really had the bandwidth or requirement to build a production build for those yet.

Are you interested in a specific operating system or CPU architecture? Would love to understand your scenario.

> I used to think we'd eventually get to capability based security, but now I see we'll always be stuck with application permission flags, the almost worthless bastard cousin, instead.

My hope is that WASI will introduce capability based security to the mainstream on non-mobile computers [0] - it might just take some time for them to get it right. (And hopefully no half-baked status-quo-reinforcing regressive single—runtime-backed alternatives win in the meantime.)

[0]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/...

WasmTime finished finished the RFC for the implementation details in June: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/5032

[3]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/pull/2611