Faasm.js - Offloading PoC

The aim of this project is to create a shared execution environment that spans the browser and an underlying Faasm cluster. This means the same functions can be executed in both environments without modification.

Faasm provides lightweight isolation based on WebAssembly, hence the existing runtime and browser environments are not dissimilar. With some extra abstraction and a new communication layer in the browser, we can create seamless interoperation between the two.

This PoC demonstrates the following:

Execution of unmodified Faasm functions in the browser
Chaining of function calls from the browser into an underlying Faasm cluster
Sharing state between the browser and the cluster

Below is a "quick start" guide followed by a discussion of the implementation and challenges.

Caveats

There are a few caveats to be aware of before looking into the code:

When dealing with WebAssembly there's a lot of fiddling with byte arrays
C++ code has lots of casting to and from uint8_t
Javascript code makes heavy use of Uint8Array.
The C++ code uses the low-level Faasm API involving lots of byte arrays. This be made much nicer
There's an inherent mismatch between asynchronous JS and synchronous WebAssembly (see section below)

Quick Start

Note: this requires Docker, docker-compose, Node.js and npm.

To run the PoC:

# Install the deps
npm install

# Run Faasm
npm run faasm

# Start the demo app
npm start

If you visit http://localhost:3000 you should see a page with some links, one to the "Hello" function. Visit this page in the latest Chrome and have the console open and you should see the messages.

Experimental WebAssembly features

Faasm uses some experimental WASM features, to make sure your browser can support them all, you'll need to use the latest Chrome and enable them:

Go to chrome://flags
Enable "Experimental WebAssembly" and "WebAssembly SIMD support"

Building WebAssembly

To build WebAssembly binaries we use the Faasm toolchain container (faasm/toolchain). This is just a pre-built LLVM 9 with some libraries compiled to WebAssembly to run in the Faasm environment.

To start the toolchain container you can run:

npm run toolchain

From the resulting prompt you can invoke the wasm build for the functions in the func dir with:

./scripts/build_wasm.sh

The resulting WebAssembly files are placed in the public/wasm directory (where they can be loaded from the browser).

To see the text representation of the .wasm files, you can either use the Chrome debugger, or run the following script from within the Faasm toolchain container:

./scripts/wast.sh <path to wasm file>

E.g.

./scripts/wast.sh public/wasm/hellojs.wasm

Uploading functions to Faasm

To offload work to Faasm, the functions must also be uploaded to the Faasm instance. To do this you can run the following (provided you've built the functions as described above):

npm run upload -- <func name> <your file>

For the hellojs example this would be:

npm run upload -- hellojs public/wasm/hellojs.wasm

These are uploaded to Faasm under the faasmjs user.

PoC Discussion

Execution Model

Faasm functions make "chained" calls to other functions to perform parallel processing and offload work. This chaining is fundamental to implementing more complex serverless applications and is a key part of the Faasm runtime.

In the browser-based context we have a single Faasm function written as a WebAssembly binary, executing in a Javascript Web Worker. This makes chained calls over the network to an underlying Faasm cluster. Functions in the cluster can then make further chained calls.

The browser-based function is free to await the results of these chained calls, or to continue its execution.

Interaction Between Browser and Cluster

At the moment the interaction between the browser and underlying Faasm cluster is done with HTTP requests (using synchronous XmlHttpRequests in Javascript). The use of HTTP is inefficient and could be replaced with something more lightweight (e.g. WebSockets), and synchronous requests from Javascript are now deprecated.

Unfortunately Javascript is fundamentally asynchronous, while much of the C++ code we compile to WebAssembly is fundamentally synchronous. In addition, many interactions between the browser and underlying Faasm cluster are also synchronous (e.g. transferring state, awaiting chained functions). Creating a smooth link between synchronous WebAssembly and asynchronous Javascript is the goal of Asyncify and future work would require integrating this into Faasm.js.

For now we can execute blocking Faasm functions in their own WebWorker, hence not impacting the main browser thread. There is undoubtedly a cleaner, more efficient way to do this. Faasm's function chaining model can actually be synchronous or asynchronous, supporting a fork-join approach as well as synchronous call-and-wait.

Host Interface

Faasm functions are written against the Faasm host interface. This allows functions to interact with the underlying runtime to perform serverless-specific tasks like handling state or chaining functions. This also includes a small subset of normal POSIX-like syscalls (e.g. mmap).

This interface is primarily designed for a server-side context, but we can support Faasm functions in the browser by implementing a subset in Javascript (see faasm.js).

Sharing State

Faasm functions within a cluster are able to share state via regions of shared memory and Faasm's two-tier state architecture. This kind of sharing cannot be done between functions in the cluster and functions in the browser. To solve this Faasm.js will push and pull data to and from the cluster as necessary over HTTP.

This is inefficient but works for now. The consideration of what data should live in the browser and what should live in the Faasm cluster is application-specific and down to the user.

Emscripten and WASI

Faasm defines its own custom host interface, hence has some overlap with WASI but also defines lots of its own serverless-specific functions (e.g. for managing state and function chaining). For this reason Faasm doesn't currently support WASI- or Emscripten-compiled binaries, but could do in the future.

faasm / faasmjs