2024-05-01 Community Meeting

Agenda

• DEMO: wash plugins part 2
• DISCUSSION: wasmCloud Roadmap development

Meeting Notes

• DEMO: wash plugins part 2
• Background: last week Taylor shows us a way to add wash plugins which overlapped perfectly with Robin’s demo.
  • Not quite fully operational (in progress).
  • Inside of wash lib, in the process of adding to wash cli.
  • First plugin - custom sub-commands into wash.
  • Looking at the wit, we allow access to wasi cli world and the outgoing handler and control interface.
  • Makes it easy to take cowsay (for example) to wash, all you need to do is compose a simple plugin - metadata with a register function, attached to wash.
• Taylor is now ready to show this in action for real! Check out the recording for the demo, there’s only so much you can get from notes.
• Also, check out our documentation and our handy developer guide if you want to tinker.
• This demos shows how it’s now possible to see all your current plugins via ‘plugin-list’ and install/uninstall/reinstall plugins using OCI and HTTPS/HTTPI.
• When installed we now have a Hello sub-command. wash automatically hooks in command lines to build in some validation.
• This is, essentially, full lifecycle management of plugins.
• We have updated our docs so you can try things out - toolchain section under wash (toggle 1.0). Configuration, disable, developer guide. ‘wash-build’ with the wash toolchain means your plugin will run anywhere as components.

COMMUNITY KUDOS

• Huge thank you to Mossaka (Jiaxiao Zhou) for his wasi-blobstore with the Azure API...well worth checking out.

• DISCUSSION: wasmCloud Roadmap development

• It’s an exciting moment as we start workshopping the next wave of innovation in wasmCloud.

• The roadmap for q2 this year came out of an interactive session with the community on this call, thank you all for your comments, contribution, feature requests, and suggestions!

• We will shortly update the roadmap in our documentation but please watch the recording for the detail.

DOCUMENTATION:

• We need 1st class documentation for composing components - Wasm tools compose with different components and run as one application.
  • WAC tool inclusion here.
• In the same vein more wRPC aka WITRPC documentation:
  • How and when to use it vs composition.
  • How to ship components together and communicate at runtime.
• We also have a general need for WIT best practices.
  • How to design an interface.
  • The requirement to use interfaces to import and export.
• All things NATS.
  • We would like to link out to existing documentation - streams, kv buckets etc.
• Take a look at the recording for the details on what’s coming next in wasmCloud.

NEW FEATURES:

• Recommend reading the summary of our recent Hackathon which details several new ideas in flight.
• Long-running wasmCloud workloads is an interesting next foray:
  • Mitigates time limits.
  • Pushes long-running workloads to capability providers.
  • Request work starts and notify on completion.
  • Benefit; persistently run those workloads in components where the business logic resides.
• Updating provider config at runtimes:
  • With named configuration, if you have config that you put in wasmCloud an you change it, it will auto-update all the components that are using that configuration.
  • We’re going to improve how providers are configured in the next phase of development.
• wasmCloud Postgres.
• Zero-to-twelve factor wasmCloud CRUD.
• OpenID authentication example provider (integration with identity).
• Open API to WIT—Yosh—generator; a little rough and not quite ready but a great start here.
• NPM package for React that connects back to the lattice; wash board includes a package (as yet unpublished).
• Go Provider SDK is priority for Bailey—we have the basics for wRPC in Go and so not a giant leap.
• Typescript as second on the list.
• Native testing and debugging; a common question so we will focus efforts in this arena here.
  • Test automation for Wasm components.
  • Mocking framework for unit tests.
  • Using wasi-virt for testing.
  • Debugging as an IDE.
• C# support—for discussion and is always an interest area. Check out the latest Bytecode Alliance Community Stream for a related discussion with Joel Dice on language support.
• Pluggable secrets support for wasmCloud was the most requested feature on the call, with plenty of design decisions and an RFC to follow.
• Watch out for the updated roadmap which will appear soon in docs.
• This was a wide-ranging discussion and so check out the recording below.

EXAMPLES:

• Ideally we’ll publish examples together in the repo; more to come!

In the end, we ended up with the following Roadmap that will be condensed into documentation, new features, and improvements (with additional views per-project and per-status in the GitHub project.)

Where we’ll be…

May 14th: Taylor will be at SWCon in Colorado talking all things Wasm and how it’s transforming Kubernetes estates and complex compute architectures. His talk: ‘Why Worry About WASM?’ takes place at 2pm in Breakout 3 (Wasm and Severless track).

Listen in…

• The CNCF and Bytecode Alliance came together on CNCF Cloud Native Live for an interesting discussion on WASI 0.2 the Component Model..and the role of the BA in driving forward Wasm standards and tooling.
• Cloud Native Wasm Day recordings are now live! Great to see the wasmCloud community on stage!
• Bailey joined Matt Butcher and industry analyst Dustin Kirkland on theCube (SiliconAngle) during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to talk all things WebAssembly, take a look.
• Check out the Arm Developer Podcast where Bailey and Liam discussed the intersection of Wasm and GPU technologies.
• Cosmonic CTO Bailey Hayes met Chris Matteson (Fermyon) and Oscar Spencer (F5 NGINX) on the panel at the latest Kubernetes meetup in New York. They explored the Wasm what’s, why’s, standards and considerations when adoption. The recording is live!
• Listen in to the last WasmEdge community meeting where Bailey Hayes talks all things WASI 0.2 and we hear from the students of the University of Tokyo on some cool new projects.
• Bailey was a guest on a recent Rancher Live podcast with Divya Mohan. Tune in for a deep dive into WASI 0.2!

Recording