WebAssembly (Wasm), originally developed by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others at W3C, is a secure, cross-platform, and high-performance application runtime. It serves as the execution engine for compiled C/C++ applications in modern browsers.

As Wasm gains popularity in the browser, developers found that the same attributes that made Wasm successful on the client side are also important to server-side applications. Modern server-side applications in the multi-tenancy cloud need a secure, cross-platform, and high-performance runtime to support modern compiled languages such as Rust, C/C++, and Go. Furthermore, by supporting C/C++, Wasm runtimes can support high-level languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Kotlin, and PHP.

Before Wasm, Linux containers are commonly used to run these compiled applications in the cloud — eg a Rust or C++ app is compiled to x86_64 machine code and runs inside a Linux container. Wasm provides a more secure, much lighter, faster, and more portable alternative to Linux containers for this type of performance-minded server-side application.

Value propositions

Wasm’s move from client-side to server-side follows well-traveled paths of previous generations of technologies such as Java and JavaScript. Compared with existing solutions, Wasm offers some compelling value propositions on the server side.

Compared with the JVM and JavaScript engines, Wasm supports 20+ programming languages via the LLVM toolchain. In particular, it supports emerging memory-safe programming languages, such as Rust. At the same time, Wasm provides near-native performance without sacrificing safety.

Compared with the traditional Linux containers, Wasm runtimes are safer since they have much-reduced attack surfaces (no OS libraries) and much simpler software supply chains. Wasm applications are portable across OSes and CPUs. They can be AOT compiled to native machine code at deployment time achieving near-native performance. Furthermore, Wasm consumes much less memory and resources than Linux containers.

Wasm as containers

Last year, Docker announced its support for Wasm in partnership with WasmEdge (an open-source project under the CNCF).

The demo-microservices example is a fully featured microservice written in Rust. It provides a built-in HTTP server and a MySQL database client. It is compiled into Wasm and then deployed by Docker Compose in a WasmEdge container. In Docker Desktop, we see the size of the demo-microservices Wasm container image is only 3.05 MB, which is a fraction of traditional Linux images.

Wasm, and WasmEdge in particular, are supported by many mainstream container tools.

• crun and youki are OCI runtimes that support Wasm containers.
• containerd and CRI-O are CRI runtimes that support Wasm containers.
• Docker and Podman are user-facing management tools that support Wasm containers.
• Kubernetes, including kind, k3s, microk8s, OpenShift, and others, support orchestrating Wasm containers side by side with Linux containers.

Use cases for server-side WebAssembly

Cloud-native platforms need to support untrusted and high-performance applications. Wasm containers are great choices for these use cases.

Microservices

As microservices grow popular, the infrastructure costs associated with their management are exploding. That is especially problematic for a new generation of microservice applications that are computationally intensive (i.e., AI) and performance critical (i.e., edge cloud applications).

Serverless functions are publicly accessible microservices. They are the fastest-growing product sector in public clouds.

Wasm is a secure sandbox for compiled applications. It is lightweight and portable, runs applications at near-native performance, and works seamlessly with container ecosystem tools like K8s and Docker. Developers can use the same workflow to build, deploy, and manage Wasm Apps. Wasm is a great choice for the next-generation edge cloud-based microservices. See how to create database backed microservices in Rust and WasmEdge.

SaaS/UDF

As SaaS proliferates, the demands to automate, customize, or integrate SaaS products are also increasing. Traditional webhook-based SaaS APIs are slow, bloated, complex, and not secure enough for many automation use cases.

An emerging approach is for users to simply upload customization code onto the SaaS platform, which can be triggered by SaaS events. Examples include AWS Lambda, which allows you to customize AWS workflows through functions, and GitHub Actions, which allows users to automatically respond to events in GitHub using apps running on GitHub infra.

Wasm runtimes can be easily integrated into SaaS or database platforms. They are secure, portable, and lightweight. Once integrated, Wasm runtimes can run functions (or guest apps) written in a variety of different programming languages, supporting SaaS SDKs in all popular languages.

See a database UDF example here from Nebular Graph.

Streaming data

Modern data-intensive applications often need to filter, map, and transform data in streaming or messaging pipelines. That requires user-defined functions to be embedded into the data streaming platform.

For the same reason why Wasm is a great runtime for SaaS UDFs, it is a great choice for data streaming functions too. Furthermore, Wasm runtimes such as WasmEdge, provide high-performance APIs for AI/ML processing, which makes them ideal for running compute-intensive AI/ML workloads in many streaming analytics use cases.

See a database ETL function example based on WasmEdge here.

Blockchain

Large public blockchain networks, such as Ethereum, EOS, Polkadot, NEAR, FileCoin, Cosmos, Ripple, have all committed to Wasm as their smart contract execution engines. In our view, smart contracts on public blockchain networks are decentralized serverless functions. Blockchains are ideal use cases for Wasm.

Show me the code

WasmEdge is a WebAssembly runtime that is specifically optimized for server-side and cloud-native applications. It is an open-source project managed by the Linux Foundation / CNCF. Its key features include the following.

• Seamlessly integrates into the existing cloud-native infra (e.g., Docker and K8s). Check out the Kubernetes guide.
• Fully supports the WASI specification for accessing operating system resources.
• Features a high-performance Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compiler, which drastically improves server-side application performance. It is the fastest WebAssembly on the market today.
• Supports non-block networking sockets and web services.
• Supports clients for databases, caches, and DOs.
• Supports AI inference frameworks and runtimes, such as Tensorflow, OpenVino, PyTorch, etc.
• Supports running high-level language apps written JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and others.
• Comprehensive support for the Node.js API in JavaScript apps running in WasmEdge.

To see some code examples, check out the following tutorials. You could also refer to WasmEdge book.

• Image recognition using Tensorflow.
• A database-based microservice example in Rust and WebAssembly
• Async HTTP services and clients using hyper
• JavaScript programs in WasmEdge

The road ahead

The road ahead for server-side Wasm is very promising. WasmEdge has brought the cloud-native toolchain to WebAssembly, enabling developers to use their familiar workflow in Wasm application development. Companies such as Second State, Fermyon, Cosmonic, Suborbital, VMWare, Cloudflare, Fastly, SingleStore, Shopify, InfinyOn and Microsoft, have also launched/pre-launched their own WebAssembly-based public cloud services.

The Wasm community will continue to innovate in areas such as developer tooling and component model support. We expect more exciting news, tools, use cases, and partnerships to emerge in server-side Wasm.

Join our discord server or follow us on Twitter to stay updated! See you in the community and happy coding!

[웹 어셈블리 WSAM, webassembly] WebAssembly on the server-side : 서버측 웹어셈블리

원래 Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple 및 기타 W3C에서 개발한 WebAssembly(Wasm) 는 안전한 크로스 플랫폼 고성능 애플리케이션 런타임입니다. 이는 최신 브라우저에서 컴파일된 C/C++ 애플리케이션의 실행 엔진 역할을 합니다.

경축! 아무것도 안하여 에스천사게임즈가 새로운 모습으로 재오픈 하였습니다.
어린이용이며, 설치가 필요없는 브라우저 게임입니다.
https://s1004games.com

Wasm이 브라우저에서 인기를 얻으면서 개발자들은 클라이언트 측에서 Wasm을 성공으로 이끈 동일한 속성이 서버 측 애플리케이션에도 중요하다는 사실을 발견했습니다. 멀티 테넌시 클라우드의 최신 서버 측 애플리케이션에는 Rust , C/C++ 및 Go 와 같은 최신 컴파일 언어를 지원하기 위한 안전한 크로스 플랫폼 고성능 런타임이 필요합니다 . 또한 C/C++를 지원함으로써 Wasm 런타임은 JavaScript , Ruby , Python , Kotlin 및 PHP 와 같은 고급 언어를 지원할 수 있습니다 .

Wasm 이전에는 Linux 컨테이너가 클라우드에서 이러한 컴파일된 애플리케이션을 실행하는 데 일반적으로 사용되었습니다. 예를 들어 Rust 또는 C++ 앱은 x86_64 기계어 코드로 컴파일되어 Linux 컨테이너 내에서 실행됩니다. Wasm은 성능을 중시하는 이러한 유형의 서버 측 애플리케이션을 위해 Linux 컨테이너보다 더 안전하고, 훨씬 가볍고, 빠르고, 이식성이 뛰어난 대안을 제공합니다.

가치 제안

클라이언트 측에서 서버 측으로의 Wasm의 이동은 Java 및 JavaScript와 같은 이전 세대 기술의 잘 알려진 경로를 따릅니다. 기존 솔루션과 비교하여 Wasm은 서버 측에서 몇 가지 강력한 가치 제안을 제공합니다.

JVM 및 JavaScript 엔진과 비교하여 Wasm은 LLVM 툴체인을 통해 20개 이상의 프로그래밍 언어를 지원합니다. 특히 Rust 와 같은 새로운 메모리 안전 프로그래밍 언어를 지원합니다 . 동시에 Wasm은 안전을 희생하지 않고도 기본에 가까운 성능을 제공합니다 .

기존 Linux 컨테이너와 비교할 때 Wasm 런타임은 공격 표면이 훨씬 줄어들고(OS 라이브러리 없음) 훨씬 단순한 소프트웨어 공급망을 갖기 때문에 더 안전 합니다. Wasm 애플리케이션은 OS와 CPU 간에 이식 가능합니다 . 배포 시 네이티브 기계 코드로 AOT 컴파일되어 네이티브에 가까운 성능을 얻을 수 있습니다 . 또한 Wasm은 Linux 컨테이너보다 훨씬 적은 메모리와 리소스를 소비합니다.

컨테이너로서의 Wasm

작년에 Docker는 WasmEdge (CNCF 산하 오픈 소스 프로젝트) 와의 파트너십을 통해 Wasm에 대한 지원을 발표했습니다.

데모 마이크로서비스 예제는 Rust로 작성된 모든 기능을 갖춘 마이크로서비스입니다. 내장된 HTTP 서버와 MySQL 데이터베이스 클라이언트를 제공합니다. 이는 Wasm으로 컴파일된 다음 Docker Compose에 의해 WasmEdge 컨테이너에 배포됩니다. Docker Desktop에서 데모 마이크로서비스 Wasm 컨테이너 이미지 의 크기는 3.05MB에 불과하며 이는 기존 Linux 이미지의 일부에 불과합니다.

특히 Wasm과 WasmEdge는 많은 주류 컨테이너 도구에서 지원됩니다.

• crun과 youki는 Wasm 컨테이너를 지원하는 OCI 런타임 입니다.
• Containerd 및 CRI-O는 Wasm 컨테이너를 지원하는 CRI 런타임 입니다.
• Docker 및 Podman은 Wasm 컨테이너를 지원하는 사용자 대상 관리 도구입니다.
• kind, k3s, microk8s, OpenShift 등을 포함한 Kubernetes는 Linux 컨테이너와 함께 Wasm 컨테이너 오케스트레이션을 지원합니다 .

[출처] https://medium.com/wasm/webassembly-on-the-server-side-c584f874b4a3