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Fundamentals

Fundamentals

Golem is a serverless computing platform that helps you build and deploy reliable distributed systems with simple code.

In this section, you will learn some key terms and architecture that will help you better understand Golem.

Key Terms

  • WASM. WebAssembly , or WASM, for short, is a specification for a portable and secure virtual machine. Software compiled to WASM can execute on any platform and architecture using a WASM Runtime.
  • Components. In WebAssembly, components are the unit of compilation and deployment. A component requires certain capabilities from the host platform (like input/output), exposes a typed public API, and can contain one or more agent types. Golem supports building components in TypeScript, Rust, Scala, and MoonBit.
  • Agents. In Golem, agents are durable, stateful units of computation. Each agent is identified by its type name and constructor parameters, and has its own resources such as RAM, file system, and environment variables. Agents are created from external events like requests or by other agents.
  • Invocations. In Golem, the fundamental unit of work is an invocation of a function that is part of an agent’s typed public API. Functions may require typed parameters as input and may return typed values as output.
  • High-Reliability. Highly reliable systems must execute critical logic uninterrupted, even through faults, updates, and cloud flakiness. Golem provides transparent high-reliability, regardless of language or technology stack.
  • WIT. WIT is a standard of WASM, similar to Protobuf, which allows developers to export a typed public API from components. Through the API Gateway, Golem lets you build HTTP APIs atop these typed public APIs using code-first route definitions.

Golem Architecture

Golem is architected as a series of independent and modular components, ranging from command-line tools to core systems responsible for deployment and execution.

  • CLI. Golem CLI is a command-line interface to Golem, which has the ability to create and manage components and agents, perform invocations, and even connect to live agents for diagnostics and troubleshooting.
  • API Gateway. API Gateway routes HTTP and MCP requests to agents by delegating their processing to specific functions on specified agents.
  • Agent Executor. Agent Executor creates and executes the logic of many individual agents, potentially created from different components, exposing their public typed API via the API Gateway.
  • Component Registry. Component Registry stores component versions and runs HTTP endpoints that allow programmatic management of all the features of Golem. CLI and Console are both implemented atop it.
  • Shard Manager. Shard Manager handles both supervision of individual executor nodes in the Golem cluster and the task of distributing all agents across the available executor nodes in a Golem cluster.
  • Golem Cloud. Golem Cloud is the fully managed version of Golem, suitable for companies looking for a true zero-ops approach to building highly-reliable distributed systems with simple code.
  • Console. Console is a graphical user-interface designed to help manage accounts, components, and agents on Golem Cloud. It provides high-level ways of performing many of the same tasks that are supported by CLI.
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