Fluvio is a high-performance, distributed streaming platform for real-time data. Lately, we’ve been working hard on our most exciting feature yet: the ability to write custom code that operates inline on your streaming data. We call this feature SmartModules, and it’s powered by WASM to be as lightweight and high-performance as possible. In this blog, I want to dive in and talk about how to get started writing your own SmartModule, and how to install it into Fluvio to process your streaming data.

Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll be doing with SmartModules in this blog: filtering server logs by log-level!

You can check out the full code for this blog in the SmartModule examples repo!

Filters

The simplest type of SmartModule is a filter, which can examine each record in a stream and decide whether to accept or reject it. All records that are acceptedby a filter will be delivered down the dataflow to the consumer, but records thatare rejected will be discarded from the stream.

Note that this does not mean that records are deleted from the partition they are persisted in, it simply means that those records are not delivered to the consumer.

Some good use-cases for filters include:

• Filtering application logs based on log-level (explored in this blog),
• Detecting and filtering out records containing Social Security numbers,
• Selecting a subset of records based on a user or group ID.

Example use-case: Filter Records by JSON fields

For this example, we’re going to work with streams of JSON data, and we’re going to filter our records based on the contents of specific JSON fields. SmartModules are written using arbitrary Rust code, so we can also pull in other crates as dependencies. We’re going to use serde and serde_json to help us work with our JSON data. If you want to jump ahead and see the finished code, check out our JSON filter example .

Create a new Project

SmartModules require some special build configurations, so to make it easy to get started we created a cargo-generate template with all the setup already done. You can install cargo-generate using cargo install:

$ cargo install cargo-generate

Now let’s use cargo-generate to set up our new SmartModule project. We’ll want to give the project a name and choose the “filter” option.

$ cargo generate --git https://github.com/infinyon/fluvio-smartmodule-template
⚠️   Unable to load config file: ~/.cargo/cargo-generate.toml
🤷   Project Name : log-level
🔧   Generating template ...
✔ 🤷   Which type of SmartModule would you like? · filter
[1/7]   Done: .cargo/config.toml
[2/7]   Done: .cargo
[3/7]   Done: .gitignore
[4/7]   Done: Cargo.toml
[5/7]   Done: README.md
[6/7]   Done: src/lib.rs
[7/7]   Done: src
🔧   Moving generated files into: `log-level`...
✨   Done! New project created log-level

Alright, now that we have our setup all ready, let’s talk about what we’re going to be filtering.

The Data: Server Logs

Suppose we have a web server that accepts HTTP requests from clients, does some stuff, and then returns a response. It is common for such servers to have an application logging system where they report various events taking place within the server so that it may be monitored. We can imagine that this web server is exporting logs to Fluvio via a producer, and that the logs are formatted as JSON describing the event that occurred.

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say we have a file that we’ve stored our logs into, so that we can manually produce them to a Fluvio topic and consume them back using our JSON SmartModule. Create a file called server.log with the following contents:

$ cat server.log
{"level":"info","message":"Server listening on 0.0.0.0:8000"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Deserializing request from client"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Client request deserialized"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Connecting to database"}
{"level":"warn","message":"Client dropped connection"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Deserializing request from client"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Client request deserialized"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Connecting to database"}
{"level":"error","message":"Unable to connect to database"}

Each line in this file represents one event that occurred in our server. We can see that each event is tagged with a “level” describing the significance of the event, and a “message” with a description about what happened. This style of rating logs with different levels is a common pattern in application logging, and we’re going to use it as the basis of our filter. Specifically, we’re going to write a filter that excludes all “debug” log, but accepts any “info”, “warn”, or “error” logs. In a real-world scenario, this could dramatically help reduce the traffic and noise in the logs if we were to consume these records into an analytics platform for inspection.

The Code: Writing our Filter

Let’s look at the starter code crated by the Filter generator:

$ cd log-level && cat src/lib.rs

We should see the following code:

// src/lib.rs
use fluvio_smartmodule::{smartmodule, Result, Record};

#[smartmodule(filter)]
pub fn filter(record: &Record) -> Result<bool> {
    let string = std::str::from_utf8(record.value.as_ref())?;
    Ok(string.contains('a'))
}

The Record type contains the binary data for a single event in our topic. In our case, this will be a UTF-8 encoded string that is also a valid JSON value. The first step we’ll need to take is to parse our Record as JSON so that we can inspect it and determine what level the log is. We can use serde’s derive feature to define types that represents our log data.

#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord, serde::Deserialize)]
#[serde(rename_all = "lowercase")]
enum LogLevel {
    Debug,
    Info,
    Warn,
    Error
}

#[derive(serde::Deserialize)]
struct StructuredLog {
    level: LogLevel,
    #[serde(rename = "message")]
    _message: String,
}

We’re using #[derive(serde::Deserialize)] to implement Deserialize for our types, which will allow us to convert our raw data into instances of StructuredLog. We have also defined a LogLevel enum that implements Deserialize as well as Ord, or “Ordering”. When deriving Ord for an enum, the variants may be compared to one another using < and >, where later-defined variants are “greater than” earlier-defined variants. In other words, we have LogLevel::Error > LogLevel::Debug and so on for each pair of LogLevels. Notice also that we have defined a field for our logs’ messages, but it is unused (which is why it is named _message). This is because our filter will not care about the message in the log, just the level. However, by including it in our StructuredLog definition, we can be sure that all logs that we pass through the filter do indeed have a “message” field. In this way, our filter is also acting as a sort of schema validator, only accepting records that properly conform to the shape that we expect.

Now, let’s write the logic for our filter. We’ll start by parsing our raw data into instances of StructuredLog.

use fluvio_smartmodule::{smartmodule, Record, Result};

#[smartmodule(filter)]
fn filter(record: &Record) -> Result<bool> {
    let log: StructuredLog = serde_json::from_slice(record.value.as_ref())?;

    todo!()
}

Here, we’re parsing our input data from JSON into an instance of our StructuredLog struct that we defined earlier. If the parsing fails, the ? after serde_json::from_slice says that we’ll return the Err, sort of like throwing an exception. When parsing succeeds, we receive an instance of our StructuredLog struct.

Now for the final step, we want our filter to accept all records except for “debug” logs. In other words, we actually want to keep the records that are “more important” or “greater than” LogLevel::Debug. Since we have implemented Ord for LogLevel, this will be a piece of cake! Let’s look at all the code for the finished filter.

use fluvio_smartmodule::{smartmodule, Record, Result};

#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord, serde::Deserialize)]
#[serde(rename_all = "lowercase")]
enum LogLevel {
    Debug,
    Info,
    Warn,
    Error
}

#[derive(serde::Deserialize)]
struct StructuredLog {
    level: LogLevel,
    #[serde(rename = "message")]
    _message: String,
}

#[smartmodule(filter)]
fn filter(record: &Record) -> Result<bool> {
    let log: StructuredLog = serde_json::from_slice(record.value.as_ref())?;

    // We keep records that are "greater than" debug
    Ok(log.level > LogLevel::Debug)
}

Let’s make sure our code compiles.

If you’ve never compiled for WASM before, you’ll need to install the proper rustup target. You should only need to do this once.

$ rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

We’ll use release mode in order to get the smallest and fastest binary possible. We should be able to see the .wasm file appear in the target directory.

$ cargo build --release
   Compiling log-level v0.1.0 (/home/user/log-level)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 2.33s

$ ls -la target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release
.rwxr-xr-x  135Ki user 19 May 13:29   log_level.wasm

Test Drive: Producing and Consuming the Data

Now that we’ve written our filter, let’s play with some data and make sure we get the results we expect! If you haven’t installed Fluvio yet, head on over and download the Fluvio CLI and then follow the getting started guide for your OS, or sign up for Infinyon Cloud for a free account and a hosted cluster.

Once we have our CLI and cluster all set up, we’ll start by creating a new topic where we’ll produce our data.

$ fluvio topic create server-logs
topic "server-logs" created

In order to see the impact of our SmartModule filter, let’s open two terminals, with each running a consumer that watches our server-logs topic. One of these will be a plain consumer that consumes all the records, and the other one will use our filter, so we should only see non-debug logs.

To run the plain consumer, use the following command:

$ fluvio consume server-logs -B

In the other terminal, run a consumer with the SmartModule filter using this command:

$ fluvio consume server-logs -B --filter="target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/log_level.wasm"

Finally, we can take our server.log file and use fluvio produce to send each line of the file as one record to our topic. In a third terminal, run the following command to produce the server logs to our topic:

$ fluvio produce server-logs -f server.log

In the plain consumer, we should see all the records get passed through:

$ fluvio consume server-logs -B
{"level":"info","message":"Server listening on 0.0.0.0:8000"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Deserializing request from client"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Client request deserialized"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Connecting to database"}
{"level":"warn","message":"Client dropped connection"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Deserializing request from client"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Client request deserialized"}
{"level":"debug","message":"Connecting to database"}
{"level":"error","message":"Unable to connect to database"}

But in the consumer with our SmartModule, we’ll no longer see any of the records whose log level was debug!

$ fluvio consume server-logs -B --filter="target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/log_level.wasm"
{"level":"info","message":"Server listening on 0.0.0.0:8000"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"warn","message":"Client dropped connection"}
{"level":"info","message":"Accepted incoming connection"}
{"level":"error","message":"Unable to connect to database"}

At this point, feel free to play around with the filtering logic and try out SmartModule on your own sample data!

Conclusion

We hope this blog was able to give you a good hands-on feeling for what SmartModules are all about. We have a lot of exciting plans for the future, such as SmartModules that can transform data (mapping) in addition to filtering. Be sure to stay tuned for future posts as we roll out these features in upcoming releases!

Update: SmartModules were originally called SmartStreams. The blog was updated to reflect the new naming convention

Further reading

• Read about Fluvio: the Programmable Data Platform
• Learn more about Fluvio’s SmartModules
• Create a free Infinyon Cloud account