Getting Started with Knative

Chapter 5. Installing Knative

Before you can begin using Knative to build and host workloads, you need to install it. You should also run a few commands to validate that it’s up and working as expected. This chapter walks through the necessary steps for installing and validating Knative from a Mac or Linux shell.

Standing Up a Knative Cluster

To start with, you’ll need a Kubernetes cluster. Knative requires Kubernetes version 1.11 or newer. You must enable the MutatingAdmissionWebhook admission controller on the cluster. For a simple start, you can use Minikube on your local machine or get a cluster up and running in the cloud.

Why Are We Installing Istio?

We haven’t discussed Istio at all so far, but all of a sudden it shows up as part of the install. What is it and why do we need it for Knative?

Istio is a service mesh that provides many useful features on top of Kubernetes including traffic management, network policy enforcement, and observability. We don’t consider Istio to be a component of Knative but instead one of its dependencies, just as Kubernetes is. Knative ultimately runs atop a Kubernetes cluster with Istio.

The purpose of this report is not to detail the inner workings of Istio. Pretty much everything you need to know about Istio in order to work with Knative is covered in this chapter. If you’re looking for more, start with “What is Istio?” and the Istio documentation.

Note

There are many options for standing up a Kubernetes cluster. Deciding which one to use ...