Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform for building, deploying, and managing serverless applications. It extends Kubernetes with higher-level abstractions that simplify application deployment, automatic scaling, traffic management, and event-driven processing.
The platform centres on two components: Serving and Eventing. Serving manages request-driven container workloads, while Eventing connects applications through a flexible event delivery system. Knative Functions adds developer tooling for creating and deploying functions without requiring detailed knowledge of Kubernetes resources.
Knative can run on Kubernetes clusters hosted on premises or by cloud providers. Its components can be used independently or together, allowing developers to introduce serverless capabilities without replacing their existing infrastructure.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Deploys stateless applications and functions as serverless containers using Kubernetes-native resources.
- Automatically scales workloads according to incoming requests, including scaling to zero when services are idle.
- Provides configurable concurrency limits, scaling thresholds, and minimum and maximum replica counts.
- Manages HTTP traffic routing, ingress configuration, custom domains, and TLS termination.
- Creates immutable revisions of application code and configuration, allowing earlier deployments to be retained.
- Supports traffic splitting between revisions for canary releases, blue-green deployments, and gradual rollouts.
- Uses CloudEvents for standardized event delivery between producers and consumers.
- Provides Eventing Brokers and Triggers for receiving, filtering, and routing events to applications.
- Supports Channels and Subscriptions for decoupling event producers from consumers.
- Includes Knative Functions for creating, building, running, and deploying functions through a command-line interface.
- Offers function templates for HTTP requests and CloudEvents across several application development frameworks.
- Integrates with Kubernetes infrastructure, networking components, and observability tools.
- Supports deployment across different Kubernetes environments without depending on a particular cloud provider.
Website: github.com/knative/serving
Support:
Developer: The Knative Authors
License: Apache License 2.0
Knative is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| FaaS | |
|---|---|
| Serverless | Simple way to build serverless applications |
| Fission | Fast and Simple Serverless Functions for Kubernetes |
| Knative | Kubernetes-based, scale-to-zero, request-driven compute |
| Nuclio | Serverless for Real-Time Events and Data Processing |
| OpenWhisk | Serverless Functions Platform for Building Cloud Applications |
| wasmCloud | Runs and orchestrates WebAssembly workloads across clouds and edge |
| Nitric | Cloud application framework with automated infrastructure provisioning |
| Spin Operator | Kubernetes operator for deploying and managing Spin applications |
| Fn | Event-driven Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) compute platform |
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