Compute

Swift runtime for Fastly Compute@Edge

Getting Started

Create a new swift package using the executable template

swift package init --type executable

Install the Compute runtime:

.package(url: "https://github.com/swift-cloud/Compute", from: "2.14.0")

Add it as a target dependency:

.executableTarget(
    name: "MyApp",
    dependencies: ["Compute"]
)

Deploy

The easiest way to deploy a Swift app to Fastly is through Swift Cloud.

Swift Cloud is a fully managed platform as a service for deploying SwiftWasm apps to Fastly. You can connect your Github account and deploy your apps in 1 click.

Documentation

Complete documentation is very much a work in progress:

https://compute-runtime.swift.cloud/documentation/compute/

Sample App

Here’s what a Swift app looks like on Compute@Edge

import Compute

try await onIncomingRequest { req, res in
    let fetchResponse = try await fetch("https://httpbin.org/json", .options(
        headers: ["user-agent": "swift-compute-runtime"]
    ))
    let text = try await fetchResponse.text()
    try await res.status(200).send(text)
}

SwiftWasm

Swift on Compute@Edge is made possible by the incredible SwiftWasm project, but probably not in the way you might think. Web Assembly is making waves as being a new high performance environment for web application development but it’s also powering cloud computing platforms like Fastly Compute@Edge. Deploying to Fastly involves compiling your code to Web Assembly and then deploying it to a Fastly service. This can be accomplished via GitHub actions but the absolute easiest way to deploy your code is through Swift Cloud. Swift Cloud builds your code on AWS Fargate instances and then optimizes the WASM binary using Binaryen. Fastly services are managed behind the scenes and we make it really simple to integrate things like Edge Dictionaries, Backends and environment variables.

Routing

The Compute package incldues an Express style router based on Vapor’s routing-kit. Here are some basic ways to use the router:

GET Route

import Compute

let router = Router()

router.get("/status") { req, res in
    try await res.status(.ok).send("OK")
}

router.get("/user/:name") { req, res in
    let name = req.pathParams["name"] ?? ""
    let text = "Hello, \(name)!"
    try await res.status(.ok).send(text)
}

try await router.listen()

POST Route

import Compute

struct User: Codable {
    let name: String
}

let router = Router()

router.post("/user") { req, res in
    let user = try await req.body.decode(User.self)
    try await res.status(.created).send(user)
}

try await router.listen()

Fetching Data

One of the main drawbacks of WebAssembly today is no standardized way to handle sockets. Because of this SwiftWasm does not have access to some Foundation classes like URLSession. This requires each runtime to provide their own networking layer until a standardized threading and socket model is introduced into the WASM spec.

The Compute package provides the fetch(_ url: String) function for sending asynchronous HTTP requests. The implementation is largely modeled on the HTML5 fetch() spec including full support for streaming request and response bodies, async/await, and Codable support.

Important: In order to use fetch you must pre-define the hostnames that you will be calling out to. For example, if you are integrating with the Stripe API you must pre-define api.stripe.com in your Fastly service. Swift Cloud also makes this really easy to define all of your external origins when creating your project. We sincerely hope this is a short term limitation of the Fastly platform and believe they are working on a mechanism to call arbitrary backends without the need to pre-define them.

GET Request

let data = try await fetch("https://httpbin.org/json").json()

POST Request

let res = try await fetch("https://httpbin.org/json", .options(
    method: .post,
    body: .json(["name": "Andrew"])
))

Proxy Request

A really powerful feature of the Compute package is the ability to proxy to another origin. Fasty’s edge platform is a globally distributed CDN that provides unprecendented performance compared to a single region origin. Using Compute you can put a full featured CDN in front of your origin to do things like force HTTPS, enable HTTP/3, provide robust origin failover, and a lot more.

/// req: IncomingRequest, res: OutgoingResponse
let data = try await fetch(req, origin: "https://httpbin.org", .options(
    cachePolicy: .ttl(10, staleWhileRevalidate: 30)
))
try await res.proxy(data)