Knative Cookbook

Preface

Serverless architecture has recently taken center stage in cloud native application deployment. Enterprises started to see the benefits that serverless applications bring to them, such as agility, rapid deployment, and resource cost optimization. As with any other new technology, there were multiple ways to approach and/or employ serverless technologies, such as Function as a Service (FaaS) and Backend as a Service (BaaS)—that is, running your applications as ephemeral containers—with the ability to scale up and down.

Knative was started with the simple goal of having a Kubernetes-native platform to build, deploy, and manage your serverless workloads. Kubernetes solves a lot of cloud native application problems, but with a fair bit of complexity, especially from the perspective of deployment. To make a simple service deployment with Kubernetes, a developer has to write a minimum of two YAMLs, such as a Deployment service, and then perform the necessary plumbing work to expose the service to the outside world. The complexity makes an application developer spend more time crafting the YAMLs and other core platform tasks rather than focusing on the business need.

Knative tries to solve these Kubernetes problems by providing all essential middleware primitives via a simpler deployment model. On Knative you can deploy any modern application workload, such as monolithic applications, microservices, or even tiny functions. Knative can run in any cloud platform that runs Kubernetes, ...