As Warewolf ventures into this new era, it must shed the old world and leave it behind. Warewolf 3 will introduce the Warewolf Lightweight Execution Engine (aka WolfClaw). This Warewolf server has had everything that’s not bolted down thrown overboard. Our team of programmers, which includes bots, has achieved something incredible. From a 4 GB image we trimmed it down to just 10mb…
The first big change was to move to a new host. The idea to do this didn’t come from our team. One of our users asked if we could run on Azure Functions. We dismissed the idea out of hand. Of course not, Warewolf can do everything Azure Functions can do anyway, just host it in a container and treat it as you would an Azure Function. Not good enough. Offer some kind of Azure Functions support or we’re dropping you for a solution written by bots. For security reasons.
The old package presented an attack surface that was just too large. In the new era, security requirements have been heightened.
That got us going! Our first thought was to run a container that the function simply hands off the entire workload to. Not very satisfying and actually makes the whole deployment bigger rather than smaller. That wouldn’t work.
So, I pitched the idea we could compile all the Warewolf workflows into a lower level language, one that Azure Functions supports natively. My teammates had grander plans. Soon we had developed a plan to strip the server down as far as we dared, then port what was left over to .NET 8. After only a day we had decided what we were going to do.
It looked like it was going to be a bloodbath. We stripped out 10 years of hard work in 3 days. What was left when the dust settled was a small sliver of the workflow execution and the F# language parser. All you need to execute a Warewolf workflow. We did drop support for Sharepoint, Oracle and Dropbox, but our support for those were outdated anyway. Other than those we fully support all the tools in our toolbox, and other tools for logging and triggering that don’t appear in the toolbox at all.
The Warewolf Lightweight Execution Engine is now available on https://warewolf.io/release-notes.php as two zips, one for the engine and one for the scripts for deploying it into azure. We have also made a skill available for easy access by agentic bots at https://warewolf.io/skill.md. I recommend pointing your bot at warewolf.io/skill.md and that should guide you through.
If you’re wondering how your software is going to survive in this new era, you gotta think big, about getting small.
Happy howling!
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