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timecraft

The WebAssembly Time Machine

Timecraft is a software runtime that executes WebAssembly modules with sandboxing, task orchestration, and time travel capabilities.

The development of distributed systems comes with many challenges, and satisfying the instrumentation, scale, or security requirements adds to the difficulty. By combining a sandbox, a task orchestrator, and a time machine in a software runtime, Timecraft intends to bring the tools and structure to help developers on their journey to construct, test, and operate such systems.

Project Maintenance Status (2024-02-15)

Timecraft has been archived because we are now focusing on developing solutions for a different problem than what the runtime was developed for.

We are keeping the repository open-source because the code can be reused and the program is a useful starting point for other projects that would tackle similar problems. It is also a great showcase of things that can be built with Wazero and WebAssembly, which are truely amazing pieces of technology.

If you are interested in following what we are developing, don't hestitate to check out our website and join our Discord channel!

Getting Started

Timecraft is developed in Go on top of the Wazero WebAssembly runtime.

The simplest path to installing the runtime is to use the standard installation method of Go applications:

go install github.com/stealthrocket/timecraft@latest

For a more detailed section on other ways to install and configure Timecraft, see Installing and Configuring.

Timecraft can execute applications compiled to WebAssembly. This repository has examples for applications written in Go and Python. At this time, the Go programs need the new GOOS=wasip1 port, which is part of Go 1.21.

WebAssembly is an emerging technology which still has limitations when compared to native programs. For a more detailed section on building applications to WebAssembly, see Preparing Your Application.

To try some of the examples, first compile them with this command:

make testdata

The compilation created programs with the .wasm extension since they are compiled to WebAssembly. We will use the example program get.wasm, which makes a GET request to the URLs passed as arguments:

$ timecraft run testdata/go/get.wasm https://eo3qh2ncelpc9q0.m.pipedream.net
ffe47142-c3ad-4f61-a5e9-739ebf456332
Hello, World!

There are few things to see here: the first line printed by Timecraft is the unique identifier generated to represent this particular program execution and its recording in the local Timecraft registry. The second line saying "Hello, World!" is simply the response from this API endpoint that we sent the request to.

The Time Machine has recorded the program execution, and can be accessed to get insight from the program that was executed. It can reconstruct high level context such as the HTTP requests and responses that were exchanged by the application, for example:

$ timecraft trace request -v ffe47142-c3ad-4f61-a5e9-739ebf456332
2023/06/28 23:29:05.043455 HTTP 172.16.0.0:49152 > 44.206.52.165:443
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: eo3qh2ncelpc9q0.m.pipedream.net
> User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
> Accept-Encoding: gzip
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2023 06:29:04 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 14
< Connection: keep-alive
< X-Powered-By: Express
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
<
Hello, World!

To dive in, the help subcommand is a useful entrypoint to get an up to date list of the supported capabilities, or take a look at the Wiki for a walk through the documentation!

Stability guarantees and future development

We are actively working on improving Timecraft and iterating closely with our design partners to prioritize the development, which may from time to time require the introduction of backward-incompatible changes to the APIs, data formats, and configuration. As we mature the technology, we will progressively advance towards offering more stability guarantees. The release of a v1.0 will be the indicator that we are promising to support all the public facing interfaces. To help us on this journey, do not heistate to reach out and submit feedback, ideas, or code contributions!

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome! Anything that is not a simple fix would probably benefit from being discussed in an issue first.

Remember to be respectful and open minded!

Time Machines

The Time Machine is a core primitive of Timecraft that brings a new step function in scaling the development and operation of distributed systems. Because the recording happens at the bottom-most level of interaction between the host runtime and the guest applications, it scales with the addition of new capabilities. For example, recording all network connections at the socket layer means that we can track the network messages exchanged in any protocol. Applications using protocols that cannot yet generate high-level observability can still be executed and recorded, and capabilities can be added later on to extract value from the records.

Decoupling the recording from the high-level machinery is the architectural model that brings scalability. Instead of systems having to implement their instrumentation, the separation of concerns offered by the low-level recording capability provides a much more powerful model where extracting context from the record does not require modification of the application code, and can happen after the fact on records of past executions.

Because the capture happens on the critical path of the guest application, it must be fast. The write path of the time machine must be optimized to have the lowest possible cost. The data captured is first buffered in memory, then sent to local storage and can be synced asynchronously to an object store like S3 for long-term durability at an affordable cost.

Over time, we anticipate that the development of most operational capabilities could be built on top of Time Machines: time travel debugging through layers of services, high-level telemetry, or deterministic simulations could all be derived from the records captured from the execution of guest applications on the runtime. The possibilities span far beyond software operations and could even reach the realm of data analytics: data lakes of application records where asynchronous batch processing pipelines create views tailored to provide insight into all aspects of the products built on top of those distributed systems.

One of the main challenges of those Time Machines is facilitating access to the scale of records that it produces. Even with effective compression to minimize the storage footprint, they can geneate very large volumes of information. Developing solutions to efficiently access the gold mine of data captured in the logs is one of the responsibilities that Timecraft can fulfill on behalf of the applications it runs.

Task Orchestration

The industry is progressively adopting task orchestration as a way to reach new levels of engineering and infrastructure scale. The Serverless/Microservice model is showing its limits and the realization is settling that composing large amounts of infrastructure pieces with container orchestrators is not viable. The container as a unit carries too much responsibility and building the tools necessary to successfully develop and operate distributed software systems has to rely on primitives which are not well suited to the challenge.

Workflow orchestrators are responses to the impracticality of scaling the development and maintenance of such systems at the infrastructure layer. The frameworks raise the abstraction level, giving engineers composable building blocks that they can use to detach the software logic of their distributed applications from the infrastructure layout. Decoupling helps control the problem scope of each layer, giving engineers a lot more runway to grow and scale their systems by dealing with simpler logical problems at each layer instead of having to account for the combination of possibilities created by leaky abstractions.

In successfully enabling engineers to reach the next level of scale, those solutions hit another physical limit: the complexity of the business logic grows exponentially with the number of orchestrated tasks. In our experience, this limit is attained extremely quickly after the introduction of a workflow orchestrator; it does not prevent the system from continuing to scale and grow, but it limits the engineers’ ability to add features and assist product development because their time is allocated to creating the observability and controls needed to successfully manage the platform. Time Machines are a much more effective answer to this problem, the always-on recording and complete view of the system execution they provide free engineering resources from the responsibility of creating the necessary instrumentation.

Untrusted Code Execution

The tension of limited product development capacity also creates a window of perspective into the next barrier that businesses run into: the increased complexity of their product logic makes it impractical to build software accounting for and evolving with all possible use cases. This is when the need to allow external parties to customize their product usage by injecting small pieces of software into the platform arises. Opening up the door to external contributors is also seen as an opportunity to lift the pressure off of tightly locked engineering resources; however, it never works unless the engineering team is already able to leverage this development model, then external developers are just one of the many entities contributing to the product.

The need to enable customization from third parties comes with extreme challenges to controlling product safety and quality. The ability to create products allowing the secure injection of code is becoming a differentiating factor between companies that delight customers in the way they can be customized to their needs and those that are collapsing under the weight of their attempt at incorporating all possible use cases in their core product.

By combining a time machine and a task orchestrator with the sandboxing compabilities of WebAssembly, Timecraft offers a novel take on the way distributed systems can be built to address the ever more complex demand that businesses have for software.