Getting Started with Knative

Chapter 8. What’s Next?

There’s still so much more in the young Knative ecosystem, and more is constantly being added. There is already work being done to bring other existing open source serverless frameworks onto Knative. For example, Kwsk is an effort to replace much of the underlying Apache OpenWhisk server components with Knative instead. Other open source serverless projects have been specifically built with Knative in mind and have even helped contribute upstream to the Knative effort. For example, Project riff already provides a set of tools to help ease building functions and working with Knative. This chapter will take a brief look at what it’s like to build and run functions on Knative using some of the work from the Project riff team.

Building Functions with Project riff

The Hello World examples in Chapter 2 showed how easy it is to deploy an existing image from a container registry to Knative. The Kaniko example in Chapter 3 as well as the Buildpack method in Example 6-1 demonstrate how to both build and deploy a simple 12-factor app to Knative. The examples so far have focused on containers or applications as the unit of software. Now think back to Chapter 1 and the mention of functions. What does it look like to deploy a function to Knative? The answer is that it looks pretty much the same. Thanks to the Build module, Knative can take your function code and turn it into a container in a similar way as it does with any application code.

What Makes It a Function? ...