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essa-rs

Essa is an experimental stateful serverless programming framework based on WebAssembly.

This project was heavily insprired by cloudburst, which provides a "low-latency, stateful serverless programming framework". Essa differs from the original project in multiple ways:

  • WebAssembly functions: Instead of requiring that the user-provided functions are written in Python, we use the WebAssembly format. WebAssembly — or "Wasm" for short — is a portable instruction format that aims to be as fast as native code, while being completely sandboxed. Multiple programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, or C# can be compiled to it already. These properties make Wasm very suitable for running untrusted user functions in a serverless framework.
  • Written in Rust: While the original cloudburst is written in Python, we rely on the Rust programming language. In addition to Rust's memory safety guarantees and high performance, this choice has the advantage that we can easily use the wasmedge-sdk or the wasmtime crate for running WASI-compatible WebAssembly functions.
  • Based on our anna-rs project: The original cloudburst project uses the anna key-value store for storing function state. While we follow that design, we instead use our anna-rs port, which is written in Rust instead of C++ and communicates using zenoh instead of ZeroMQ.

Note: This project is still in a prototype state, so don't use it in production!

Overview

This project contains several executables:

  • essa-function-executor: Allows to compile and execute a WebAssembly module and its functions. We use WasmEdge as the default executor. By enabling the feature wasmtime_executor, we can use wasmtime as the executor.
  • essa-function-scheduler: Schedules function execution requests to function executors.
  • essa-test-function: A WebAssembly module that can be run in essa. It shows how to perform function calls across nodes and how to share state between them.
  • run-function: Helper executable to start a given WebAssembly module by passing it to a function scheduler.

The following libraries are provided to interact with the Essa framework in WebAssembly crates:

  • essa-api: Provides an interface to essa functions, which can be used from WebAssembly modules written in Rust.
  • essa-macros: Provides macros to automatically make Rust functions in WebAssembly modules compatible with the essa function call ABI. Re-exported from essa-api.

Build

You need the latest version of Rust for building.

The build commands are:

  • cargo build --workspace --exclude essa-test-function for a debug build
  • cargo build --workspace --exclude essa-test-function --release for an optimized release build

After building, you can find the resulting executables under ../target/debug (for debug builds) or ../target/release (for release builds).

To run the test suite, execute cargo test. The API documentation can be generated through cargo doc --open.

Run

In order to run essa-rs, you need to first initialize the anna-rs submodule through git submodule update --init.

For a quick demo, run cargo run -p essa-test-function --example local. This command will compile and start all necessary runtime nodes, compile the essa-test-function to WASM, and then run the compiled WASM module on the started essa-rs nodes. It is worth noting that in this demo, WasmEdge will be used as the default executor.

For a manual run, execute the following commands in different terminal windows:

  • Start an anna-rs routing node:

    cargo run --release --manifest-path anna-rs/Cargo.toml --bin routing -- anna-rs/example-config.yml

  • Start an anna-rs KVS node:

    cargo run --release --manifest-path anna-rs/Cargo.toml --bin kvs -- anna-rs/example-config.yml

  • Start the essa-rs function scheduler:

    cargo run --release -p essa-function-scheduler --bin function-scheduler

  • Start an essa-rs function executor node with ID 0:

    cargo run --release -p essa-function-executor -- 0

    cargo run --no-default-features --features wasmtime_executor --release -p essa-function-executor -- 0

  • Compile the essa-test-function to WASM and start it through the run-function executable:

    cargo build --release -p essa-test-function --target wasm32-wasi
cargo run -p essa-function-scheduler --bin run-function -- target/wasm32-wasi/release/essa-test-function.wasm

    The output of the WebAssembly function is then shown in the console window of the essa-function-executor process.

The above commands should result in the same output as the demo command mentioned at the beginning of this section.

Instead of using cargo run --release, it is of course also possible to first compile the executables as described in the Build section and then run them from the target/release folder.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.