Knative

What is Knative and how does it combine the best of containers and serverless?

Knative is a revolutionary tool that seeks to optimize workload management in the cloud, combining the best of the container and serverless worlds. Using the robustness of Kubernetes, Knative facilitates the creation and management of serverless services, offering agility and flexibility in application deployment. But how exactly does it do that? Let's find out.

What is Knative and who developed it?

Knative, a project initially developed by Google, involves technology giants such as IBM, Red Hat, and Cisco. This platform allows you to deploy and manage workloads in a serverless model based on Kubernetes. By reducing dependency on a specific cloud provider, Knative ensures workload portability and flexibility, overcoming limitations typical of serverless platforms.

How does Knative help with service and version management?

Knative consists of two main elements: service management and event management. Regarding services, it allows to manage multiple versions of the same service, distributing the traffic efficiently between them thanks to Istio, an integrated mesh service. This means that:

• You can have multiple versions of a service active simultaneously.
• Istio manages traffic between versions, directing requests to the one you have configured.
• The configuration allows you to decide which versions are exposed and which require authentication.

How does Knative handle events and subscriptions?

In the serverless context, many applications respond to events. Knative incorporates this with a second component that handles events through a specification called CloudEvents. This allows interoperability between different messaging and event services, such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub or Kafka. It can be contemplated in two types of transmission:

1. Simple transmission: a model where the event is delivered directly to the service.
2. Complex transmission: Uses channels and subscriptions, ensuring that messages are not lost if a service is down, allowing delivery when available.

The latter model is especially useful in scenarios where reliability of message delivery is crucial.

Why consider Knative for your architecture?

Integrated on top of Kubernetes and supported by Istio, Knative provides a solid framework for modern cloud architectures. Its advantages include:

• Portability: Consistent, portable services that are not dependent on a single vendor.
• Scalability: Ability to respond dynamically to variable events and workloads.
• Modularity: Integratable code blocks that connect to databases and other services.
• Development API: Facilitates the creation, deployment and monitoring of applications programmatically.

Knative is ideal for those looking to combine the best of container environments with the advantages of serverless, adopting a modern, flexible and highly efficient architecture.

How to deploy Knative on Google Cloud Platform?

While we recommend waiting until the next lesson to explore in detail the implementation of Knative on Google Cloud Platform, the general idea is that this platform allows you to use Knative in an integrated way, leveraging all Google Cloud services for a complete and optimized cloud experience.

This is just the beginning of leveraging a technology that will undoubtedly shape the future of cloud computing - come explore Knative and discover how it can transform your projects!