aWsm (awesome)

aWsm is an efficient serverless runtime built with the silverfish compiler. It combines WebAssembly sandboxing with asynchronous I/O to provide a lightweight serverless solution suitable for edge computing.

Host Dependencies

• Docker - Installation Instructions
• libuv

If on Debian, you can install libuv with the following:

./devenv.sh install_libuv

Setting up the environment

Note: These steps require Docker. Make sure you've got it installed!

We provide a Docker build environment configured with the dependencies and toolchain needed to build the aWsm runtime and serverless functions.

To setup this environment, run:

./devenv.sh setup

To enter the docker environment, run:

./devenv.sh run

To run applications

From within the Docker container environment

Run the following to copy the awsmrt binary to /awsm/runtime/bin.

cd /awsm/runtime
make clean all

There are a set of benchmarking applications in the /awsm/runtime/tests directory. Run the following to compile all benchmarks runtime tests using silverfish and then copy all resulting <application>_wasm.so files to /awsm/runtime/bin.

cd /awsm/runtime/tests/
make clean all

You've now built the binary and some tests. We will now execute these commands from the host

To exit the container:

exit

From the host environment

You should be in the root project directory (not in the Docker container)

cd runtime/bin/

We can now run aWsm with one of the serverless functions we built. Let's run Fibonacci!

Because serverless functions are loaded by aWsm as shared libraries, we want to add the runtime/tests/ directory to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(pwd):$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ./awsmrt ../tests/test_fibonacci.json

The JSON file we pass contains a variety of configuration information:

{
  "active": "yes",
  "name": "fibonacci",
  "path": "fibonacci_wasm.so",
  "port": 10000,
  "argsize": 1,
  "http-req-headers": [],
  "http-req-content-type": "text/plain",
  "http-req-size": 1024,
  "http-resp-headers": [],
  "http-resp-size": 1024,
  "http-resp-content-type": "text/plain"
}

Notice that it is configured to run on port 10000. The name field is also used to determine the path where our serverless function is served. In our case, our function is available at http://localhost:10000/fibonacci

Our fibonacci function expects an HTTP POST body of type "text/plain" which it can parse as an integer to figure out which Fibonacci number we want.

Let's get the 10th. Note that I'm using HTTPie to send a POST request with a body containing the parameter I want to pass to my serverless function.

Note: You possibly run the awsmrt command in the foreground. If so, you should open a new terminal session.

echo "10" | http :10000

In my case, I received the following in response. The response is 55, which seems to be correct!

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-length: 3           
Content-type: text/plain                      

55

Stopping the Runtime

When you are finished, stop aWsm with

./devenv.sh stop