2023-11-29 Community Meeting

November 29, 2023

Brooks Townsend

wasmCloud Maintainer

DEMO: Custom wash build commands, --build-only and --sign-only

New feature - 0.25.0 custom build commands for wash build.
- This brings us a little bit more manual control over the wash-build process.
This demo takes a component generated by cargo component new and setting up the project to support running in wasmCloud. This requires adding a wasmcloud.toml file and setting up the custom build command to call cargo component build instead of cargo build.
- Eventually this will just be a part of wash build, but this is illustrative of how we may support new languages.
Allows us to work with up-and-coming language toolchains, which will be super important for many developers.
Check out the recording for the full demo.

Q&A:

Bailey: does this mean we point this at a language we don’t know about?
- Yes! That’s what it’s built for.
Kevin: If I do cargo-component as a command component, I don’t get any WIT - where is the WIT?
- It is a command CLI command-style component the wit is just inferred from the dependency in the Cargo.toml.
- Bailey: We should be designing semantic APIs so that we become composable - make reactors, not commands.

DISCUSSION: wasmCloud 1.0 milestone

We’re reaching a significant milestone in the evolution of wasmCloud - wasmCloud 1.0 will launch in the New Year.
You’ll start to see a ton more materials, RFCs and promotion around wasmCloud 1.0 in the coming weeks.
We have been operating for over 4 years - some of us have been working on it that whole time and the community has grown.
The application we put in for wasmCloud to move to Incubation demonstrates this stability — it feels like the right moment to move towards production-ready, stable status.
From new features to stabilizing existing APIS there’s really not all that much we need to work on, it is just putting our level of confidence in our stability, which we now have.
The Key part is WASI Preview 2 and the Component Model - dropping wasmCloud with that stable set of WIT definitions.
We want folks to work with components in wasmCloud. We also want folks to find it easy and seamless to move their projects from dev to prod.
Decent bit of work to do as we move towards 1.0. We will socialize a brand new roadmap which will dig into the details and where we track every issue associated with the wasmCloud 1.0 milestone.
Roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/wasmCloud/projects/7/views/8.
1.0 - needs to have open telemetry (which we already have), we also need to look at inventory logging standpoint. Great selling point for integration into existing cloud native environments.

Q&A

Jochan Rau: We implement a data processing actor - using messaging. In linkdef we need to give the creds. We could use key value store but it’s more meta level and not really the responsibility of the actor to know where the creds are stored. Is there a way to make this easier and make sure our creds are protected?
- Secrets management strategy has been discussed and there is a stale RFC for a basic level of secrets config.
- Our answer right now is to use a providers like the Hashicorp Vault implementation in order to store secrets.
- The big question around that is if you need to send the secret over the wire. E.g. pull out Github secret to send over HTTP - will go over NATS in the current methodology and expose sensitive data.
- We’ll bring up this RFC again - tokenization on the linkdef is important. More to come on this in the coming months.
- Team to sync with Jochen in Slack.
There was plenty of additional discussion and plenty of insight from Victor, so check out the recording below.

Summary of issues, PRs and RFCs:

We had a much wider discussion amongst the community members and so check out the recording for more.