A Serverless Kubernetes?

August 7,2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Just announced at Google Next: Knative¹. Knative provides a set of middleware components that allow you to build container-based applications that can run anywhere: On-premises, in the cloud, or even in a third party data center.

What’s unique about Knative is the fact that it’s built on a Kubernetes-based framework that provides serverless features. Serverless systems, enable developers to focus on writing code without having to worry about building, deploying, and managing an application.

Serverless computing, as the name implies, means that users don’t need to deal with the concept of a virtual server, as they do within most public cloud computing systems. You focus on writing the application, and the serverless systems will automatically pick the right configuration, provision the resources, run your code, and return the resources back the way that they came. You don’t provision anything, you only pay for the resources the serverless system uses, and you’re abstracted from the complexity.

Knative allows you to run your serverless workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine by enabling the serverless add-on. This serverless add-on helps developers orchestrate builds and events with a single click of the mouse.

The value of this technology is that it allows builders to build. Instead of dealing with the underlying application management and operations issues, you can focus on how the applications work. There’s no longer the distraction of correctly configuring your Kubernetes instances, as well as the containers that are parts of clusters, or worrying that all of the infrastructure supporting your container-based applications are working and playing well together.

Knative is geek compliant. It focuses on a familiar development experience, supports common development platforms such as GitOps, DockerOps, ManualOps, and others, and it supports tools and frameworks such as Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring, and many more. This means that the productivity of leveraging what’s familiar does not leave when you deploy containers using serverless mechanisms.

The value of this is obvious. Container and Kubernetes developers can be more productive in a serverless world, as already proven with other serverless development environments that are supported by most public clouds. This productivity enables greater agility, meaning that applications can be changed and built more quickly, and placed directly into production. There’s the potential to save major money, but also gain the value of agility that most businesses need to improve.

I suspect that Knative will be the way most people who build container-based systems on Kubernetes choose to leverage this technology. People have a tendency to move toward technology that offers the least amount of resistance and latency. Clearly, Knative offers a path.

¹Source: https://cloud.google.com/knative/