Articles and tutorials

Getting Started with Function as A Service in Rust

Function as a Service (FaaS) is one of the fastest growing areas of cloud computing. FaaS allows developers to focus on the code. Once the developer uploads the code, the FaaS takes care of deployment, service availability, and scalability. The developer only pays for resources the service uses, not reserved idle time. This approach, known as serverless computing, is the way to build inter-connected and microservice-based applications. The result are fast development turn around, easy deployment, high availability, infinite scalability, at low cost.…

Image Classification as A Service in Node.js

In the previous article, we discussed how WebAssembly could tie together native TensorFlow, Node.js JavaScript, and Rust functions to create high performance and safe web services for AI. In this article, we will discuss how to apply this approach to ImageNet's MobileNet image classification model, and more importantly, how to create web applications for your own retrained MobileNet models. NOTE This article demonstrates how to call operating system native programs from the SSVM.…

Use Binary Data as Function Input and Output

In the previous article, we demonstrated how a Second State FaaS function could handle text-based input and output. Through JSON support, we can encode arbitrary data types into text. However, for functions focused on media processing, binary-based input and output is far more efficient and more performant. In this article, we will show you how to use a Second State FaaS function to add watermark to an image. The source code for the watermark example in this article is available on Github.…

High performance and safe AI as a Service in Node.js

Today’s dominant programming language for AI is Python. Yet, the programming language for the web is JavaScript. To provide AI capabilities as a service on the web, we need to wrap AI algorithms in JavaScript, particularly Node.js. However, neither Python nor JavaScript by itself is suitable for computationally intensive AI applications. They are high-level, ie, slow, languages with heavy-weight runtimes. Their ease-of-use comes at the cost of low performance. Python got around this by wrapping AI computation in native C/C++ modules.…

Deploying Uniswap on the Oasis Ethereum ParaTime

The Oasis Ethereum ParaTime is a high-performance and privacy-first Ethereum runtime on the Oasis network. It supports both the classic EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and the future Ewasm (Ethereum flavored WebAssembly). All Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized applications should be able to migrate and run on the Oasis network, and enjoy enhanced performance and privacy, without any modification. The “litimus test” for such migration is the Uniswap DEX. Uniswap is one of the most widely used and most advanced decentralized applications on the Ethereum network.…

👏 Get a Free Raspberry Pi Kit- Wave 2

No purchase necessary. Learning and coding are mandatory! Offer ends on September 30th 2020. Learn to create a high performance Node.js application. In the process, you will learn how to write simple functions in the Rust programming language. Share your source code and learning experience to the community via social media. We will send you a FREE Raspberry Pi kit ($25). You can use it as a personal dev server.…

Enable AJAX access for Tencent Serverless Cloud Functions

An important use case of serverless functions is to act as endpoints for AJAX calls from HTML web pages. This way, we can build truly “serverless” web applications with static HTML + JS pages on the front end, and serverless functions on the backend. A good example is this web page for fitting and plotting eigenvectors, a common machine learning task, on a 2-D data set. The web page calls a WebAssembly-based Tencent Serverless Cloud Function via AJAX.…

Reload Deno cache after upgrading

Since it's v1.0 release, the Deno framework is iterating in a very fast pace. It releases a new version almost every other week. It is generally a good idea to keep your Deno install updated with the latest release. The deno command provides a built-in upgrading tool. The following command upgrades Deno to the latest release. $ deno upgrade You can also upgrade or downgrade to a specific version of Deno, like this:…

🧐 How to install Ubuntu 20.04 on a Raspberry Pi Zero?

To use the Raspberry Pi as a personal dev server, you should install Ubuntu Server 20.04 TLS. With Ubuntu, you can use the latest Node.js and WebAssembly services on the device. But can I use Ubuntu Server 20.04 on the smallest Raspberry Pi Zero? The NOOBS SD card you purchased from most online stores probably only has the 64-bit version of Ubuntu pre-installed. It would not boot on the 32-bit Raspberry Pi Zero (W).…

🦕 Tutorial: Deno Apps with WebAssembly, Rust, and WASI

Deno is created by the original developer of Node.js, Ryan Dahl, to address what he called 10 things I regret about Node.js. It did away with the NPM and the infamous node_modules. Deno is a single binary executable to run applications written in TypeScript and JavaScript. However, while TypeScript and JavaScript are suitable for the majority of web applications, they could be inadequate for computationally intensive tasks, such as neural network training and inference, machine learning, and cryptography.…