aWsm (awesome)

aWsm is an efficient WASM runtime built with the silverfish compiler. This is an active research effort with regular breaking changes and no guarantees of stability.

Host Dependencies

• Docker

Additionally, if you want to execute the Awsm runtime on your host environment, you need libuv. A reason you might want to do this is to debug your serverless function, as GDB does not seem to run properly within a Docker container.

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 Aswsm 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 ApacheBench to make this request.

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

echo 10 >fib.txt
ab -c 1 -n 1 -p fib.txt -v 2 http://localhost:10000/fibonacci

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

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1807734 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)...INFO: POST header ==
---
POST /fibonacci HTTP/1.0
Content-length: 3
Content-type: text/plain
Host: localhost:10000
User-Agent: ApacheBench/2.3
Accept: */*


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

55

..done


Server Software:
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            10000

Document Path:          /fibonacci
Document Length:        3 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.001 seconds
Complete requests:      1
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      100 bytes
Total body sent:        141
HTML transferred:       3 bytes
Requests per second:    952.38 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.050 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.050 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          93.01 [Kbytes/sec] received
                        131.14 kb/s sent
                        224.14 kb/s total

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        1    1   0.0      1       1
Processing:     0    0   0.0      0       0
Waiting:        0    0   0.0      0       0
Total:          1    1   0.0      1       1

Stopping the Runtime

When you are finished, stop Awsm with

./devenv.sh stop