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Knative – Kubernetes-based platform to manage modern serverless workloads

cloud.google.com

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

#111

Post by happythought »

isdal wrote: post #45
mikevm wrote: 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…

I’ve read through this whole thread and everyone is struggling to understand the primary use case for knative. Your comment is the most clear.

Please please please at the forefront of all docs, presentations, and blogs put something like this:

Knative’s primary use case is for you to provide your own cloud-neutral, on-prem, or hybrid-cloud serverless platform built on top of kubernetes.

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

#113

Post by yebyen »

jacques_chester wrote: post #2

I've been around Knative for a few months on behalf of Pivotal (our blogpost here[0] and TheNewStack here[1]). Other leading contributors are IBM, SAP and Red Hat. Subject to my biases, what would people like to know? [0] https://content.pivotal.io/blog/knative-powerful-building-bl... [1] https://thenewstack.io/knative-enables-portable-serverless-p...

Hey, glad to see you again!

It looks like I have some more catch up to play, I see a rails logo on this page...

I emailed you a couple of days ago or yesterday about the Ruby support in Riff. There's not a PR yet but we got Ruby into a working state again! It looks like not a lot of people are interested in Ruby on serverless platforms.

Can you shed any light on why? And what kind of Ruby support can I expect from knative, given that it's not apparently coming from the Riff project now... as a Rails dev who wants to use this stuff today, how do I get started?

(It has a Rails logo on the page linked by the post, so I assume I can use it now, but I haven't gone deeply enough to see if there are limitations... I'm used to Ruby support being neglected in the serverless areas, I don't know if it's because we Ruby devs are slacking, or there's a fundamental flaw I haven't seen yet, or what...)

So, what can you tell me about that Rails logo on the landing page?

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

#114

Post by vosper »

sahrizv wrote: post #112

I recently tweeted about these abstractions over abstractions here: https://twitter.com/sahrizv/status/1018184792611827712 Not downplaying the team's effort and the immense utility of this to many companies.

Rather than linking to your own tweet, perhaps you could post the comment here and save us all a click?

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

#115

Post by jacques_chester »

djhworld wrote: post #91
evankanderson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> get closer to pay-for-what-you-use. How though, won't you need a Kubernetes cluster running?

The exact economics depend on where the billing boundary falls. For on-prem the economics will probably follow one of central IT budget, showback or chargeback and I expect the case for hugging the curve as tightly as possible is weaker.

For cloud providers the boundary is likely to become execution-seconds. As Kubernetes worker nodes become abstracted away this will be the remaining way to track utilisation.

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

#116

Post by ryangregg »

djhworld wrote: post #91
evankanderson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> get closer to pay-for-what-you-use. How though, won't you need a Kubernetes cluster running?

On the small scale, no, it's not pay-for-what-you-use. Imagine though you're an enterprise, running a large K8S cluster with lots of workloads inside. By using Knative and scale-to-zero, now you can pack more lightweight workloads into the same cluster resources, because the pods scale down when they're not actively being used. It gives you (as the cluster operator in your company) the ability to run your cluster the same way serverless works in the cloud.

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

#117

Post by xrd »

dewitt wrote: post #82
otterley wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dece…

Is this something like what you're looking for? https://github.com/knative/serving/blob/master/docs/spec/ove... Or a little higher-level: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CbwVC7W2JaSxRyltU8CS... There are a lot of technical docs in the individual repositories. You can get started, for example, with the serving docs under: https://github.com/knative/serving/tree/master/docs Same for the other repos, like build…

Your doc is marked invite only, BTW.

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

#118

Post by sahrizv »

vosper wrote: post #114
sahrizv wrote: post #112

I recently tweeted about these abstractions over abstractions here: https://twitter.com/sahrizv/status/1018184792611827712 Not downplaying the team's effort and the immense utility of this to many companies.

Rather than linking to your own tweet, perhaps you could post the comment here and save us all a click?

Fair point, but the medium changes the message sometimes. :-)

The tweet resonated with a sizeable part of the developer community hence linked here.

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

#119

Post by jacques_chester »

yebyen wrote: post #113
jacques_chester wrote: post #2

I've been around Knative for a few months on behalf of Pivotal (our blogpost here[0] and TheNewStack here[1]). Other leading contributors are IBM, SAP and Red Hat. Subject to my biases, what would people like to know? [0] https://content.pivotal.io/blog/knative-powerful-building-bl... [1] https://thenewstack.io/knative-enables-portable-serverless-p...

Hey, glad to see you again! It looks like I have some more catch up to play, I see a rails logo on this page... I emailed you a couple of days ago or yesterday about the Ruby support in Riff. There's not a PR yet but we got Ruby into a working state again! It looks like not a lot of people are interested in Ruby on serverless platforms. Can you shed any light on why? And what kind of Ruby support can I expect from kn…

Yes, I'm sorry I didn't reply to you -- I was caught by the problem that I knew this was imminent but not being able to say so (or even hint so).

> It looks like not a lot of people are interested in Ruby on serverless platforms. Can you shed any light on why?

I imagine there's some mix of market demand and path dependency. A lot of folks who like experimenting moved onwards to the Node ecosystem and a lot of FaaS work has happened there. Meanwhile enterprises are heavily invested in Java and .NET.

The riff team at the moment is pretty small. One thing coming up is to fold buildpacks into the code->running pathway for riff. This should make it easier for the riff team to get out of the business of supporting particular ecosystems and for some of the engineering work for buildpacks to be shared amongst multiple setups.

In terms of starting with Rails today, it should be possible to use the buildpacks BuildTemplate to run the existing Ruby buildpack. I don't know if it's working, it's early days for heavy automation of development on Knative itself.

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

#120

Post by jacques_chester »

polskibus wrote: post #83

Can I run functions written on any platform on Knative? Java? .net core? Js? What about startup times? How do they compare to other solutions?

> Can I run functions written on any platform on Knative? Java? .net core? Js?

Anything that meets the Container Runtime Contract[0] should work.

> What about startup times? How do they compare to other solutions?

Startup times need a lot more work. Knative has a number of moving pieces which are contributing delay to startup time and they're being discussed or attacked by various groups. Some of this work will probably require changes to be contributed upstream to Kubernetes and Istio.

[0] https://github.com/knative/serving/blob/5b8542fb58044834d50f...

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