Getting Started with Knative

Preface

Kubernetes has won. Not the boldest statement ever made, but true nonetheless. Container-based deployments have been rising in popularity, and Kubernetes has risen as the de facto way to run them. By its own admission, though, Kubernetes is a platform for containers rather than code. It’s a great platform to run and manage containers, but how those containers are built and how they run, scale, and are routed to is largely left up to the user. These are the missing pieces that Knative looks to fill.

Maybe you’re running Kubernetes in production today, or maybe you’re a starry-eyed enthusiast dreaming to modernize your OS/2-running organization. Either way, this report doesn’t make many assumptions and only really requires that you know what a container is, have some working knowledge of Kubernetes, and have access to a Kubernetes installation. If you don’t, Minikube is a great option to get started.

We’ll be using a lot of code samples and prebuilt container images that we’ve made available and open source to all readers. You can find all code samples at http://github.com/gswk and all container images at http://hub.docker.com/u/gswk. You can also find handy links to both of these repositories as well as other great reference material at http://gswkbook.com.

We’re extremely excited for what Knative aspires to become. While we are colleagues at Pivotal—one of the largest contributors to Knative—this report comes simply from us, the authors, who are very passionate about Knative ...