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Capabilities

A capability is an abstraction or representation of a non-functional requirement; some functionality required by your actor that is not considered part of the core business logic. As you write an actor that exposes some data over a RESTful endpoint, the HTTP server and the database are not parts of your business logic, they are services used by your actor--capabilities.

In wasmCloud, capability providers are self-contained processes that implement a capability contract, which corresponds with a well-defined API. A capability contract ID is a unique name that identifies an interface or service abstraction. By convention, capability contract IDs contain a vendor ID prefix (the vendor that defines the contract, not necessarily a specific implementation). For example, the following is a list of the first-party capability contract IDs supported by wasmCloud (and, for each of these contract IDs, wasmCloud has implemented a default capability provider):

  • wasmcloud:httpserver
  • wasmcloud:httpclient
  • wasmcloud:messaging
  • wasmcloud:keyvalue

Additionally, the following capability contract IDs have corresponding capability provider implementations that are built-in to the host.

  • wasmcloud:builtin:numbergen
  • wasmcloud:builtin:logging

An actor must be signed with a capability contract ID to be allowed to use any capability provider with that contract ID.

The list of capability providers continues to grow. Please refer to these github links for more information:

Capability contracts (and their associated IDs) are open, and any organization is free to create implementations of them. We believe a healthy wasmCloud ecosystem includes multiple implementations, from multiple vendors, of capability contracts, including those with wasmcloud:-prefixed IDs. In fact, wasmCloud has created multiple implementations of some of its own contracts.

Building a Provider​

Building a provider can be done in any language, though most of our samples are in Rust. For a hands-on tutorial and walk-through guide, check out our creating a capability provider guide.

WASI-Based Capability Providers 🔮​

In the (hopefully) near future, the WASI specification will support regular socket-based networking, and multiple low-level WebAssembly engines (such as wasm3 and wasmtime) will support WASI-based networking functionality. When this functionality is available, reliable, and well-tested in the WASI spec and supporting engines, wasmCloud will automatically support the ability to create capability providers as portable, "privileged" WebAssembly modules that use WASI to provide networking services to their linked actors.

This section of the documentation will change when that functionality is ready to use.