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Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

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61–70 of 168 posts

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

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. : )

When do you run into rate limiting for scaling up ? We all call it serverless but somewhere there are servers you are using and they dont magically appear from nowhere.

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

#62
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

Can someone also give us a 20 sentences explanation on how it works, or an example installation? "It does magic" still leaves me wondering if this is worth investigating.

it's a PaaS .. heroku for k8s

https://github.com/knative/docs/tree/master/serving/samples/...

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

#63

Joining in, Markus from IBM and OpenWhisk. Been involved with knative for quite some time now as well. Happy to answer any questions that might arise as well. Answers might be biased and opinions are my own. See IBM's statement: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2018/07/24/ibm-clo...

Can we see a design document/theory of operations, please? It’s difficult to evaluate this effort without understanding exactly what it is - namely, the constituent components, their respective functions, how they work and relate to one another, etc.

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

#64
post #8

Thanks to everyone who played a part of this! The Google team is also watching this thread. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Can we see a design document/theory of operations, please? It’s difficult to evaluate this effort without understanding exactly what it is - namely, the constituent components, their respective functions, how they work and relate to one another, etc.

Just a comment here about this in general - given all the resources at Google’s disposal, I’m perplexed as to why we don’t see world-class (or even at least halfway decent) documentation being shipped along with the product at first release. As a community I think we need to demand higher standards in this area. If GNU can do it, Google certainly can.

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

#65
post #45
post #28

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

I'm the engineering manager at Google responsible for both Knative and App Engine Flex. What we heard from a lot of customers is that they want a serverless / App Engine Flex-like experience but one that works multi-cloud or in hybrid/on-prem setups. The goal for Knative is to fill that need, especially for people that already use kubernetes. That being said, App Engine Flex is a solid GA service that provides a full…

How would you anticipate seeing this work in, say, AWS?

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

#66
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…

Can you point us to the design document so we can further study it?

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

#68
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone also give us a 20 sentences explanation on how it works, or an example installation? "It does magic" still leaves me wondering if this is worth investigating.

it's a PaaS .. heroku for k8s https://github.com/knative/docs/tree/master/serving/samples/...

It'll be interesting to see the differences from other systems in this space (OpenShift, Deis Workflow). From the samples it appears to be more of a "pull code from github and push to Dockerhub" model than a "push code to the platform and push to an internal registry" that other PaaSes target.

https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.3/install_co...

https://deis.com/docs/workflow/understanding-workflow/archit...

disclaimer: I was one of the core maintainers of Deis Workflow.

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

#69
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone also give us a 20 sentences explanation on how it works, or an example installation? "It does magic" still leaves me wondering if this is worth investigating.

it's a PaaS .. heroku for k8s https://github.com/knative/docs/tree/master/serving/samples/...

Thank you for the link to the samples, they are much more informative. But it still doesn't quite explain it.

The samples show that you can make an app, make a container, and make a service config file, and deploy your app to K8s. Yes, we've been able to do that for some time now.

This thing is supposed to provide a bunch of advanced features for devs to not have to think about. However, the build repo says this:

"While Knative builds are optimized for building, testing, and deploying source code, you are still responsible for developing the corresponding components that: + Retrieve source code from repositories. + Run multiple sequential jobs against a shared filesystem (for example, Install dependencies, Run unit and integration tests). + Build container images. + Push container images to an image registry, or deploy them to a cluster."

"While today, a Knative build does not provide a complete standalone CI/CD solution, it does however, provide a lower-level building block that was purposefully designed to enable integration and utilization in larger systems."

So as a developer you still have to have all the things you had before, but with extra layers of abstraction now, apparently just to support hybrid cloud installations.

The marketing lingo appeals to developers as if it makes all this simple, when in fact it may be more complicated.

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

#70
Just a quick reminder from the installation documents (emphasis mine):

"If you already have a Kubernetes cluster you're comfortable installing alpha software on, use the following instructions"

This looks cool, and will likely be useful in the future, but this is still alpha quality software. Don't bet your business on it by installing it to your production clusters. Don't let your development cycle by driven by the latest shiny thing, no matter whose logo is on it.

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