Getting Started with Knative

Chapter 1. Knative Overview

A belief of ours is that having a platform as a place for your software is one of the best choices you can make. A standardized development and deployment process has continually been shown to reduce both time and money spent writing code by allowing developers to focus on delivering new features. Not only that, ensured consistency across applications means that they’re easier to patch, update, and monitor, allowing operators to be more efficient. Knative aims to be this modern platform.

What Is Knative?

Let’s get to the meat of Knative. If Knative does indeed aim to bookend the development cycle on top of Kubernetes, not only does it need to help you run and scale your applications, but to help you architect and package them, too. It should enable you as a developer to write code how you want, in the language you want.

To do this, Knative focuses on three key categories: building your application, serving traffic to it, and enabling applications to easily consume and produce events.

Build

Flexible, pluggable build system to go from source to container. Already has support for several build systems such as Google’s Kaniko, which can build container images on your Kubernetes cluster without the need for a running Docker daemon.

Serving

Automatically scale based on load, including scaling to zero when there is no load. Allows you to create traffic policies for multiple revisions, enabling easy routing to applications via URL.

Events

Makes it easy to ...