Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
WebAssembly (Wasm) is an emerging technology for web development that has garnered significant popularity in web-based applications. It enables web browsers to execute codewritten in multiple languages seamlessly, delivering high performance across different platforms. With the introduction of The WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), facilitating the execution of Wasm beyond the confines of the web, Wasm is gaining traction in cloud computing as well. Recently, Docker introduced the support of running Wasm binaries in a container runtime using WasmEdge.
This thesis investigates the performance implications and the usability benefits/issues of Wasm in container runtimes using WasmEdge compared to traditional Linux containers. To assess these aspects, two separate applications are utilized within the containers: the first application, inspired by the TPC-C benchmark, is created from the ground up to mimic a database workload, whereas the second application is WordPress, a widely adopted content management system.
In evaluating the performance implications of Wasm containers, our experiments focus on gathering metrics relevant to container usage and management. These include image size, start-up times, CPU utilization, latency, and throughput differences between Wasm containers and traditional Linux containers. Additionally, we assess the usability of Wasm containers by examining aspects such as building, managing, deploying, portability, and language support.
The finding of the thesis indicates that Wasm containers feature lower image sizes, up to 500% smaller image sizes than the Linux containers, and can improve cold-start times by 160%. However, due to the lack of multi-threading support of Wasm, the application performance becomes significantly degraded, resulting in increased latencies and reduced throughput compared to traditional containers. Furthermore, we underscore the portability advantage of Wasm containers over traditional ones in terms of usability. Nonetheless, the current language limitations of Wasm present more challenges than benefits compared totraditional containers.
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