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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

#151

Post by pas »

hrktb wrote: post #122
pas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. I had to learn Kubernetes very recently and this seems to simplify a lot of the boilerplate needed to have an app running. One the most grating part for me was having the ingress run with a proper SSL certificate with the right handshakes though (had to install a nginx controller just for that). That’s the kind of things that everyone will go through, and is solved in one click on heroku. Yet it seems to…

I think there's a Kong ingress controller, that gets you a very powerful nginx setup.

https://github.com/Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller

Knative uses parts of Istio for servign and TLS/SSL setup: https://github.com/knative/docs/blob/master/serving/using-an...

It's a bit funny that knative serving is so complicated I have still no idea what they use under the many layers of abstraction (probably something hacked together in go), and I don't understand why don't they use a generic configurable ingress component.

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

#152

Post by pas »

gdsdfe wrote: post #100
aurailious wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I am trying to figure out too. Is Knative standalone, or is it running inside your K8 cluster, or do you build a K8 cluster and run this in it exclusively?

I think it's mostly pods on your k8 cluster ... see the link to the install guide above

It has software, yes, that of course runs in pods, but ..

It's a whole lot of infrastructure to support a PaaS / FaaS workflow. From building and routing/serving/tracing to complex event driven stuff.

It's fully k8s native (hence the name, I reckon), and it uses CRDs. Which is basically k8s's DSL for describing anything. Basically a k8s-standard for k8s plugins with schema, validation, schema change management, kubectl support, etc.

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

#154

Post by pas »

reilly3000 wrote: post #76

How is this different than Kubeless on Kubernetes?

knative has "distributed tracing" and supports scaling to zero, and aims to be loosely coupled. that said I have no idea how kubeless works, but I like that they have a CLI for quickly deploying functions.

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

#155

Post by barrkel »

gdsdfe wrote: post #142
peterwwillis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the docs, the high level overview is misleading. You don't have to explain physics to explain how a car works. You only have to explain it in terms of something your audience is familiar with. Magnetization would be hard to explain to someone without physics, because there's no other parallel to quantum mechanics for the average person. But a car is based on general principles which most of us understand…

Sorry I was just trying to help. You're obviously perfectly capable of clicking on links, reading and figuring out things for yourself... My intent was to help figure out if this was worth investigating as you were wondering to which I clearly failed. You car analogy is still falling short but it doesn't matter. Best of luck ;)

The car analogy is just right, IMO. It's a functional description of how a car works at a high level, so that we can understand how it's put together; and if we're reasonably expert in mechanics, we can fill in a lot of missing details. Whereas "a box that you sit in that lets you get to where you want to go quickly" leaves out far too much detail.

Too many descriptions of tools for devs sell benefits instead of functions. This is normally good sales practice, but devs are experts in the mechanisms behind the tools they use, and they generally prefer more functional descriptions so that they can more quickly evaluate whether any given tool is a good fit for them, and what its strengths and weaknesses will be.

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

#156

Post by emilssolmanis »

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

Looks like Beanstalk for Kube by Google.

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

#157

Post by psankar »

wikibob wrote: post #55
isdal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I want to love AppEngine Flex, but it consistently takes 10+ minutes to deploy. Is this something that we can ever expect a fix for?

This is exactly the reason why we went away from appengine flex to AWS Beanstalk. As much as a google fan I am, this is unacceptably high and there seem to be no interest by Google to reduce this. Beanstalk isn't that great either but better than appengine flex when it comes to the deployment wait times.

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

#158

Post by yebyen »

barrkel wrote: post #155
gdsdfe wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I was just trying to help. You're obviously perfectly capable of clicking on links, reading and figuring out things for yourself... My intent was to help figure out if this was worth investigating as you were wondering to which I clearly failed. You car analogy is still falling short but it doesn't matter. Best of luck ;)

The car analogy is just right, IMO. It's a functional description of how a car works at a high level, so that we can understand how it's put together; and if we're reasonably expert in mechanics, we can fill in a lot of missing details. Whereas "a box that you sit in that lets you get to where you want to go quickly" leaves out far too much detail. Too many descriptions of tools for devs sell benefits instead of func…

Yeah, on the other hand I'm looking closely at this one just because of the people that showed up in this thread. I know some of these guys and their past work is exceptional, so if they're claiming to be involved in this, I am sure I'll be sorry if I don't check it out.

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

#159

Post by sequoia »

It strikes me as highly significant that a large portion of the questions here are along the lines of "what the heck is this thing?" I'm certainly in that boat: as far as I can tell Knative is some kubernetes based cloud something something that maybe let's you host your own FaaS? Like Openwhisk? Or maybe it helps you deploy or something (isn't that already what k8s does?)?

This is hopefully received by Knative devs (or marketers) that the homepage needs a major overhaul, as it's not at all clear what the product is to the average visitor.

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

#160

Post by sequoia »

gdsdfe wrote: post #75
peterwwillis wrote: post #52

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.

You basically have a git repo that contains your business logic implemented as 'functions' and some configuration : knative will build, containerize, deploy, and glue/route those functions for you to make it a full fledged app. it will also take care of load balancing/scaling etc. So all you need really is focus on you business logic code and write some config for knative ... well this is at least the vision

So it's like Serverless framework for k8s?

https://serverless.com/

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