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Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

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Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#31

Post by inlined »

dgllghr wrote: post #19

I'm a bit confused about the "eventing" application. Is it a message bus like NATS? a persistent event log like Kafka? or is it an adapter that allows applications to interact with both?

The eventing repo provides a common pluggable model for managing events. The communication layer is currently HTTP, not NATS. But the broker is pluggable and includes support for Kafka. You can choose to use Kafka throughout your cluster or just for a single feed. You can add other implementations as well.

The three pluggable abstractions are your event sources, the bus over which events are stored/sent, and the actions which should be invoked in response to an event.

Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#33

Post by gdsdfe »

jacques_chester wrote: post #26
gdsdfe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahh so you just worry about your business logic, which will be a bunch of 'functions', and knative will take care of routing, deployment, load etc. ?

I would say that yes, that is a good statement of the vision that the contributors share.

Got it! thank you! It's actually very interesting ...

Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#34

Post by gdsdfe »

evankanderson wrote: post #18
gdsdfe wrote: post #10

I kinda have a hard time understanding what it is ... is it kinda a 'glue' layer between Kubernetes and istio ? Can somebody give us a 2 sentences explanation? please and thank you

This is a way to deploy and manage a stateless web application ("function") without needing to get into a bunch of low-level details, and get closer to pay-for-what-you-use.

Very interesting! thanks!

Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#36

Post by dewitt »

jacques_chester wrote: post #29
mikevm wrote: post #28

Why would you use something like this over, say, Google App Engine Flex?

I can't give a definitive answer as I'm not very familiar with Flex. But a lot of Google folks with App Engine backgrounds are working on Knative.

Indeed. Much of what we open sourced in Knative came from what we learned from running GAE and GCF. Which is important: this isn't a side project for us, this is based on real-world experience doing it at scale for huge customers. You don't run a serverless stack for 10+ years without taking away a few lessons. : )

Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#38

Post by evankanderson »

dgllghr wrote: post #19

I'm a bit confused about the "eventing" application. Is it a message bus like NATS? a persistent event log like Kafka? or is it an adapter that allows applications to interact with both?

"eventing" is building an ecosystem to make it easy to connect events to event consumers (whether they are Knative Services, k8s services, VMs, or even a SaaS).

In order to do this, we've broken the problem down into 3 parts:

Buses provide a k8s-native abstraction over message buses like NATS or Kafka. At this level, the abstraction is basically publish-subscribe; events are published to a Channel, and Subscriptions route that Channel to interested parties.

Sources provide a similar abstraction layer for provisioning data sources from outside Kubernetes and routing them to the cluster, expressed as a Feed (typically, to a Channel on a Bus, but could also be directly to another endpoint). Right now, we only have a few generic Sources, but we plan to add more interesting and specific Sources over time.

Lastly, we have a higher-level abstraction called a Flow which bundles up the specification from the Source to the endpoint, optionally allowing you to choose the Channel and Bus which the event is routed over. (Otherwise, there is a default Bus used to provision a Channel.)

All of this is also very much work-in-progress. You're seeing the workshop as we put down our tools yesterday, not as cleaned up for a tour. :-)

Re: Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

#40

Post by markusthoemmes »

pwaai wrote: post #37

Cold startup time and mitigation strategies like those on AWS?

Even better! Knative will allow you to even scale your containers out-of-band if you know that something BIG will happen. See https://github.com/knative/serving/issues/1656 for the discussion.
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