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Knative: empowering Kubernetes ecosystem

Knative technology has been continuously rising recently, gaining the noble status of the serverless operational model of the future. According to the statistics, in 2022, 50% of clients across AWS, GCP, and Azure already use serverless frameworks, and Knative is one of the best solutions.

As Knative becomes an essential DevOps tool for cloud engineers, you should know core Knative’s features and benefits to maximize the power of your Kubernetes ecosystem and streamline your cloud workflows. And here we flow!

Knative: no ties to single cloud anymore

Knative is an open-source project for building, running, deploying, and managing serverless applications on Kubernetes, with no ties to a single cloud platform, like AWS Lambda or GCP Functions.

At 27% adoption, Knative has become the most attractive serverless platform, overcoming the biggest pain points of Kubernetes when developers crave focusing only on code, with neither deployment nor operations distress.

The very crux of the Knative project – to supervise the standards for cross-platform orchestration – is implemented by consolidating such features:

• Container creation
• Auto-scaling
• Knative’s eventing models
• Load balancing
• Developer-friendly software.

Combining serverless and container benefits

Knative boasts the Cloud infrastructure, performing servers’ handling and deployment jobs. This new technology terminates the idea of setting up complex cloud infrastructure and lets you concentrate on code only.

Knative makes the Kubernetes environment user-friendly and provides a bunch of benefits:

• Compatibility. As Knative supports cross-platforming and gives you a universal standard among cloud providers, it eliminates the chance of tying up with a single solution.
• Automation. Knative automatically packages your code and starts/stops instances as your code runs. You don’t have to learn Kubernetes to build, run and manage containers.
• Cost saving. Knative keeps resources restricted only to the assets needed for a code performance. You always pay for what you use, not what you could have used.
• Productivity. Knative relieves your teams of monotonous and challenging tasks, saving priceless time and effort on development, deployment, and maintenance.
• Community contributions. Open-source essence provides innovation, feasibility, and added value. Supported by the Cloud Native Computer Foundation, Knative gets extra transparency and rightfulness.

Three components of Knative’s magic

Knative works as an event-running framework that brings Istio (cooperation between components and users) and Kubernetes (microservices and containers orchestrator) together.

Three Knative’s components allow running serverless workloads within Kubernetes and provide tools to make processes natural and user-friendly.

1. Building. The build component converts a source code to a container. Knative pulls out a source code from a library, like GitHub. Then, this component adds all the necessary libraries so that the code could run effectively. Thus, container images are built and put in files for the Kubernetes platform.
2. Serving. The serving component is in charge of running the platform. It includes service configuration, auto-scaling, and routing to introduce new features or provide blue/green deployments.
3. Eventing. The eventing component stands behind Knative’s functions. You have to define triggers with the containerized functions in a YAML file or through CLI to let Knative do its job: to create the container, configure a network, route, roles, load balancing, and more.

Building, serving, and eventing are those three components that make Knative so incompatibly dominant in the Kubernetes environment.

Profisea: when trusted expertise required

While Knative is one of the best solutions for running applications in Kubernetes, it demands a particular level of expertise and can become a problem to use. One needs to build containers, one needs to set up load-balancing, and one needs to do a pack of other things.

If you feel swamped with the Knative technology, but you still want to increase productivity and reduce your cloud costs, contact Profisea 24×7, and our best DevOps engineers will help you in no time!

Profisea is an Israeli boutique DevOps and Cloud company that provides a full spectrum of Cloud Management services. For more than six years, we have been implementing top practices of GitOps, DevSecOps, and FinOps, and providing Kubernetes-based infrastructure services, including Knative, to help businesses of all sizes transform their organizational mindsets, increase productivity, and boost performance.