7 ms·

WebAssembly on Amazon Lambda: Lessons Learned

50 points by blopeur 4y ago

pyrolistical 4y ago
Wasm. Wasm everywhere. It’s going to be in your cdn edge node. It’s going to be your serverless target. It’s going to be your database transaction. It’s going to be your device driver. It’s going to be your interrupt. Maybe it’ll be your native language. WAT is clunky but can easily made productive with some syntactic sugar. Finally it may become your hardware target. Abstract machine no more.
- dijit 4y ago
  Predictive: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- msie 4y ago
  No.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  Lmao sounds like java 20 yrs ago. Not saying it wont get popular but just saying.
- ebingdom 4y ago
  Until wasm provides a way to release memory pages, nah.
- jollybean 4y ago
  Satire? I mean, it has it's uses ...
thorum 4y ago
FWIW, Lambda has added support for Docker images, which can run anything. They’re not limited to 500 MB either. You just have to use one of Amazon’s base images that come with the Lambda runtime installed, or add it to your existing Dockerfile. This might be the way to go for running something like Wasmer.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _6zfa 4y ago
  wasmer (as a rust library) + .wasm payload was a 5.5MB .zip file uploaded to Lambda (should have mentioned that in the article). This was without size/speed optimization as the goal.
  - synergy20 4y ago
    or just use golang, yes it might need 10MB or even 30MB for each static binary, but it's mature and production ready long time ago. or, how about fastcgi, that's essentially what lambda does. by using shared libraries each fastcgi endpoint executable could be much smaller than 5.5MB, it's boring and mature, just a bit out of fashion.
thdxr 4y ago
Very interesting! Note lambdas now can have urls if you want to set that up without setting up API Gateway Looks like the other rough edges are from being understandably overwhelmed by AWS. Would love to chat with the author of this article about how we can make WASM an option in SST (https://sst.dev https://sst.dev) so this is becomes a much easier option
WatchDog 4y ago
Why use Wasm on lambda, when you could just compile your app natively?
nmilo 4y ago
> We built a social network for pets. [...] Every story update is appended in a homemade "blockchain" running in WebAssembly in the Lambda worker. Dear God.
- paulgb 4y ago
  I assume they picked something silly so that they would focus on the actual technical goal (assessing the viability of wasm on AWS) and not getting perfectionistic or bikesheddy about the application itself.
  - anitil 4y ago
    In a wild twist they become the next tech unicorn
    - syrusakbary 4y ago
      We even created a $B business plan for PitPet, so it's just a matter of time... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l4VDbhTeiv1bnUtof3OpVuJhkRzowcVY9f2tEB3I12c/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l4VDbhTeiv1bnUtof3Op...
- _6zfa 4y ago
  It was completely a joke as mentioned in the article :) It's not actually a blockchain, just a very crude linear merkle tree. The point is that pets are appended into the blockchain, and if enough blocks get appended that don't mention your pet's birth hash, your pet is "dead" like tamagotchi. You can read it in the article in detail. It was an absurd application of "blockchain" in order to have a demo app to try to run on AWS Lambda within some hours and it worked! :)
r00tanon 4y ago
Severless.com framework has lots of plugins that allow local emulation of AWS services like S3, dynamodb, rds, etc. that your application will be using. It also helps with running debugging remote lambdas and deploying them. There's also SAM. If you are going serverless, one of these toolkits makes it a lot easier.

50 points by blopeur 4y ago

Wasm. Wasm everywhere. It’s going to be in your cdn edge node. It’s going to be your serverless target. It’s going to be your database transaction. It’s going to be your device driver. It’s going to be your interrupt. Maybe it’ll be your native language. WAT is clunky but can easily made productive with some syntactic sugar. Finally it may become your hardware target. Abstract machine no more.

dijit 4y ago
Predictive: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
msie 4y ago
No.
collegeburner 4y ago
Lmao sounds like java 20 yrs ago. Not saying it wont get popular but just saying.
ebingdom 4y ago
Until wasm provides a way to release memory pages, nah.
jollybean 4y ago
Satire? I mean, it has it's uses ...

thorum 4y ago

FWIW, Lambda has added support for Docker images, which can run anything. They’re not limited to 500 MB either. You just have to use one of Amazon’s base images that come with the Lambda runtime installed, or add it to your existing Dockerfile. This might be the way to go for running something like Wasmer.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_6zfa 4y ago
wasmer (as a rust library) + .wasm payload was a 5.5MB .zip file uploaded to Lambda (should have mentioned that in the article). This was without size/speed optimization as the goal.
- synergy20 4y ago
  or just use golang, yes it might need 10MB or even 30MB for each static binary, but it's mature and production ready long time ago. or, how about fastcgi, that's essentially what lambda does. by using shared libraries each fastcgi endpoint executable could be much smaller than 5.5MB, it's boring and mature, just a bit out of fashion.

thdxr 4y ago

Very interesting! Note lambdas now can have urls if you want to set that up without setting up API Gateway Looks like the other rough edges are from being understandably overwhelmed by AWS. Would love to chat with the author of this article about how we can make WASM an option in SST (https://sst.dev https://sst.dev) so this is becomes a much easier option

WatchDog 4y ago

Why use Wasm on lambda, when you could just compile your app natively?

nmilo 4y ago

> We built a social network for pets. [...] Every story update is appended in a homemade "blockchain" running in WebAssembly in the Lambda worker. Dear God.

paulgb 4y ago
I assume they picked something silly so that they would focus on the actual technical goal (assessing the viability of wasm on AWS) and not getting perfectionistic or bikesheddy about the application itself.
- anitil 4y ago
  In a wild twist they become the next tech unicorn
  - syrusakbary 4y ago
    We even created a $B business plan for PitPet, so it's just a matter of time... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l4VDbhTeiv1bnUtof3OpVuJhkRzowcVY9f2tEB3I12c/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l4VDbhTeiv1bnUtof3Op...
_6zfa 4y ago
It was completely a joke as mentioned in the article :) It's not actually a blockchain, just a very crude linear merkle tree. The point is that pets are appended into the blockchain, and if enough blocks get appended that don't mention your pet's birth hash, your pet is "dead" like tamagotchi. You can read it in the article in detail. It was an absurd application of "blockchain" in order to have a demo app to try to run on AWS Lambda within some hours and it worked! :)

r00tanon 4y ago

Severless.com framework has lots of plugins that allow local emulation of AWS services like S3, dynamodb, rds, etc. that your application will be using. It also helps with running debugging remote lambdas and deploying them. There's also SAM. If you are going serverless, one of these toolkits makes it a lot easier.