Kubernetes

Knative has been evolving pretty quickly. There’s a new release roughly every 6 weeks with significant changes in each release. Knative v0.7.0 was all about changes in Knative Serving (my post). Knative v0.8.0 was about deprecation of Knative Build in favor of Tekton Pipelines (my other post). Knative Serving v0.9.0 and Eventing v0.9.0 have been released a little over a week ago. In Serving, there’s a v1 API and a number of improvements on autoscaling and cold starts. Read More →

Knative 0.8.0 and Build Deprecation Knative 0.8.0 came out a couple of weeks ago with a number of fixes and improvements. One of the biggest changes in 0.8.0 is that Knative Build is now deprecated according to docs: Knative Installation docs also only include Knative Serving and Eventing without mentioning Build: kubectl apply \-f https://github.com/knative/serving/releases/download/v0.8.0/serving.yaml \\ \-f https://github.com/knative/eventing/releases/download/v0.8.0/release.yaml \\ \-f https://github.com/knative/serving/releases/download/v0.8.0/monitoring.yaml Good to know but there’s no explanation on why Knative Build was deprecated and any guidance on what is the replacement, if any. Read More →

When I talk about Knative, I often get questions on how to migrate an app from Kubernetes Deployment (sometimes with Istio) to Knative and what are the differences between the two setups. First of all, everything you can do with a Knative Service, you can probably do with a pure Kubernetes + Istio setup and the right configuration. However, it’ll be much harder to get right. The whole point of Knative is to simplify and abstract away the details of Kubernetes and Istio for you. Read More →

As you might have heard, Knative 0.7 was out last week. One of the notable changes in this release is that Knative Serving API progressed from v1alpha to v1beta. While you can still use the old v1alpha1 API, if you want to update to v1beta, you need to rewrite your Knative service definition files. The new API also allows named revisions, silent latest deploys and a better traffic splitting configuration. In this post, I want to outline some of these changes. Read More →

Cloud Pub/Sub + Cloud Run Introduction If you’ve heard of Cloud Run, you already know that it’s great for spinning public endpoints inside stateless containers to handle HTTP request/reply type of workloads. And the best part is that you only pay for the duration of the request! However, HTTP request/reply handling is not the only use-case for Cloud Run. Combined with Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Run is very well suited for internal async worker type use-cases because: Read More →

Cloud Run In my Hands on Knative series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I showed how to use Knative Serving, Eventing and Build on any Kubernetes cluster anywhere. This is great for portability but with that portability comes the overhead of creating and managing a Kubernetes cluster. Not to mention the complexity of Istio which is a dependency of Knative. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) helps with managing the Kubernetes cluster a little but you still need to worry about all the bells and whistles of a Kubernetes cluster. Read More →

In Part 1, I talked about Knative Serving for rapid deployment and autoscaling of serverless containers. In Part 2, I talked about how to connect services in a loosely coupled way with Knative Eventing. In third and last part of the series, I want to talk about Knative Build and show a few examples from my Knative Tutorial. What is Knative Build? Knative Build basically allows you to go from source code to a container image in a registry. Read More →

In my previous post, I talked about Knative Serving for rapid deployment and autoscaling of serverless containers. Knative Serving is great if you want your services to be synchronously triggered by HTTP calls. However, in the serverless microservices world, asynchronous triggers are more common and useful. That’s when Knative Eventing comes into play. In this second part of Hands on Knative series, I want to introduce Knative Eventing and show some examples from my Knative Tutorial on how to integrate it with various services. Read More →

I’ve been looking into Knative recently. In this 3-part blog series, I want to explain my learnings and show some hands on examples from the Knative Tutorial that I published on GitHub. What is Knative anyway? Knative is a collection of open source building blocks for serverless containers running on Kubernetes. At this point, you might be wondering: “Kubernetes, serverless, what’s going on?” But, when you think about it, it makes sense. Read More →

The default metrics sent by Istio are useful to get an idea on how the traffic flows in your cluster. However, to understand how your application behaves, you also need application metrics. Prometheus has client libraries that you can use to instrument your application and send those metrics. This is good but it raises some questions: Where do you collect those metrics? Do you use Istio’s Prometheus or set up your own Prometheus? Read More →