UMET Inc. is growing! To support its increasingly complex features and services, the CTO has decided to refactor its backend technology stack, and the dev team has chosen the memory-safe, high-performance Rust programming language for this important investment in the company’s future. As a new developer at UMET, your task is to build proof-of-concept (PoC) Rust applications using Cargo or Docker tools, then securely run the applications in portable WasmEdge runtime containers to validate that the new backend stack meets all the necessary requirements. When you’re done, you’ll have mastered Rust basics for application development, including working with strings, managing complex data structures, and creating an HTTP web server.

You’re a new developer at UMET Inc., an e-commerce platform that’s modernizing its backend technology stack with Rust. Your task is to create a simple HTTP service that looks up sales tax rates for U.S. ZIP codes and then deploy it in a lightweight container. To build the service, you’ll use Rust Tokio and hyper crates. You’ll compile, run, and test it in a lightweight WasmEdge container and use GitHub Actions to automatically test and validate any changes that you make. When you’re finished, you’ll have hands-on experience building, updating, and testing a minimally viable microservice using Rust and WebAssembly.

UMET Inc. is off to a great start in its efforts to refactor its backend to a modern technology stack using the popular, high-performance Rust programming language. As a new developer for the e-commerce platform, your task is to create a microservice for calculating order totals that depends on another microservice that looks up sales tax rates. Using HTML and JavaScript, you’ll create a web user interface for the microservices so that UMET product managers can test them in a browser. You’ll build and test your new application using Rust reqwest and Serde crates to make web service calls and also use Docker Compose to manage multiple Wasm and Linux containers in a single application. When you’re finished, you’ll have firsthand experience using WasmEdge command-line interface (CLI) tools to build a cloud-native application with interdependent microservices.

To support its rapid growth, e-commerce company UMET Inc. relies on lightweight, interdependent, cloud-native microservices written in Rust that can compute sales tax rates and e-commerce order totals. As a developer at UMET, it’s up to you to integrate these microservices with existing order systems. To do that, you’ll need to turn the order total microservice into a database-backed stateful service. You’ll build and test the microservice in Docker and model the application data into relational database records. You’ll connect the microservice application to a MySQL database server, and you’ll use Docker to compose and manage all components of the microservice. When you’re done, you’ll have built an order management microservice in Rust that can read and save data from UMET’s MySQL relational databases and later serve as a template for other UMET microservices.

UMET Inc.’s mission to modernize its software infrastructure has been a great success. The e-commerce company now uses Rust microservices that run in lightweight Wasm containers so that they can be deployed anywhere in the cloud. However, as more microservices are created, the overhead for managing them is becoming a problem. Using the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) sidecar, a commonly used design pattern, you’ll create a proof of concept (PoC) that demonstrates the pattern’s benefits, including reducing the complexity of connecting multiple microservices and infrastructure services (e.g. databases and web proxies). When you’re finished, you’ll have refactored UMET’s microservices to work with Dapr, reducing the overhead required to manage them.