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Native serverless computing in Kubernetes

Go Native

Article from ADMIN 78/2023

By Martin Loschwitz

Knative transfers serverless workloads to Kubernetes and provides all the container components you need to build serverless applications and PaaS and FaaS services.

If you check out the undisputed star of the container scene and its serverless capabilities, you might be somewhat disappointed to find that Kubernetes (K8s) really does not shine out of the box. Ultimately, Kubernetes sees itself as an orchestrator for container workloads across the boundaries of individual compute nodes. The keyword is "orchestrator." Kubernetes looks to manage existing containers and sees its strengths precisely there. Creating matching workloads is something it tends not to consider its job. At times, this perspective has devastating consequences from the user's point of view.

When you look at the K8s landscape from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), you will find countless solutions from which you are expected somehow to put together your own setup, including many continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools that let admins create serverless workloads for Kubernetes. That said, managing the external resources for serverless operation that are somehow grafted onto Kubernetes often turns out to be a bumpy road. Knative is the name of the project and the tool that aims to change just that.

The "K" in Knative stands – you guessed it – for Kubernetes, so it's about native integration of workloads into Kubernetes. Like many components from the K8s universe, Knative is not particularly open or flexible for newcomers, but people in the function-as-a-service (FaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) universes will benefit from the advantages of running serverless workloads with Knative. In this article, I introduce you to Knative and explain the most important terms and features.

The Beginning

If you haven't had much to do with serverless computing or Knative, you're likely to find yourself sitting in front of the Knative documentation fairly confused. Some of it reads like it was written by a marketing department –

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