Matt Bucher

• Made helm, ex microsoft, kubernetes early days contributor great guy

Definition of Serverless:

• Pattern in which the dev does not write a server process(sockets or daemons), entry point is an event handler
• Deus, open source competitor to heroku PaaS
• Explored kubernetes there, ms accquires deus, built AKS there
• Had to write new dockerfiles and images for diff images and OSs
• VMs big workhorse of the cloud
• Most functions as a service are built as a VM, supposed to be super fast, but was built on tech too bloated
• VM package the entire OS, serveral minutes to start
• Containers easier to use than VMs, dockerfiles good, dev exp for containers was great. Took 10-20 sec always less than a min
• Made no sense to have a shortlived process, but wait for 10-20 secs
• Functions:
  • Event handler function love
  • Too slow(200 msec)
  • Fixed OS and Arch -> serverless?
  • Difficult dev experience

Motivation at fermyon:

• Want fast start times
• Don’t need to know about OS and arc
• Fermyon Spin: 52ms, AWS lambda 250ms
• If you hit the 100ms threshold to load a page SEO penalties
• AWS cappin sayin 200-500ms was good
• To hit good page speed, you’d have to focus a lot on optimisation and stuff
• WASM: near native start times
• See, google page speed ranking
• spin cold starts are like 1ms

WASM:

• What is wasm? Its just another bytecode format that is platfrom and arch independent
• Designed so that in low power environments it can run as interpreted
• You can run it in JIT mode
• Make it execute at native speed
• Pre initilisation when js is used. Shaved off time doing this
• Mozilla putting scenes with wasm
• They did development in the open
• Cross browser support straight away
• People involved in standardising js were involved with wasm
• Ruby was supposed to be a shell like language, but then ruby on rails came out

WASM strengths:

• Security sandboxing
• Cross platform and cross architecture
• Fast
• Ideally supports compile to all languages
• Containers weaker because of shared kernel, wasm has much tighter security, it restricts access to sys calls

Use cases:

• BBC and amazon wrote their players on wasm, they have articles check it out

• With WASM you can pick the app you like! It takes communities to make WASM successful, compiler and toolchain of each lang needs to do it

• Mozilla gambled big with wasm, check redmonk to see wasm support rankings.

Scripting vs compiled:

• Scripting needs to be interpreted. Approach was to compile the interpreter itself
• Compile interpreter itself into wasm

Bombardier Load test command

• every single request runs in an isolated sandbox
• every single request has its own memory address
• Less than ms performance
• Once you’ve built that wasm module you can run it anywhere, entirely isolated, near native performance
• visit kwasm.sh