Popular Serverless Kubernetes Layer, Knative, Joins 1.0 Company: What to Expect?

The Knative team highlights the idea behind bridging the disparity between the maturity of the stream of components leading up to the milestone version.

Nov. 24, 2021, 1:26 a.m.

TL;DR

The Knative team, on November 2, 2021, announced the release of Knative 1.0. The announcement came with cheers, massive upgrades, and the standard paradigm of bug fixes

The new version supports multiple HTTP routing layers for Ambassador, Istio, Contour, and Kourier

Key Facts

1
Knative is the "most widely installed serverless layer on Kubernetes.
2
A selection of components will be moved up to generally available.
3
All the repositories covered in the release train will also have hit 1.0-version milestones.
4
The release features support for various extensions dedicated for eventing and serving components.
5
Tekton comes forth.

Details

Backdating to July 2018, when Google, in close partnership with top tech firms in VMWare, IBM, Red Hat, and SAP delivered an open source platform built for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. Three years and five months later, Knative is the most widely installed serverless tool on Kubernetes and is celebrating a 1.0-version milestone.

The Knative framework is built from multiple components of synced interoperable versions but with different maturity levels. The components exist in experimental to generally available levels. The team at Knative emphasized the challenging hurdle of incorporating more production-ready (experimental level) components which could cause friction in the version synchronization; therefore, they decided to move all components to version 1.0.

Knative has two main components - Serving and Eventing. Both components will be made generally available, and all repositories in the release train will be upgraded to version 1.0. In contrast, extension components will retain varying maturity levels (Alpha, Beta, or general availability).

As is the standard for major upgrades, Knative 1.0 comes with many bug fixes and performance-improvement-oriented changes in many areas, highlighting major differences between the new version and the first few or most recent versions.

Users can now integrate Amazon Kafka nodes, GCP PubSub, and RabbitMQ to enjoy multiple storage layers with the usual subscription methods. The new version supports multiple HTTP routing layers for Ambassador, Istio, Contour, and Kourier.

The eventing component has been developed to allow users to deliver workloads to off-cluster components and specific URLs of components obscure to Knative. Also on the eventing component is the documentation for event sources, event tracing for both Brokers and Channels, arrangement of composite eventing workflows with parallel and sequence components, and injecting event destination addresses into PodTemplateSpec shaped objects.

Users familiar with Kubernetes would like API shapes for serving components to match the PodTemplateSpec to be redesigned to facilitate a better user experience.

There is a bit to report about certificate issuing. TLS certificates have been configured for automatic provisioning either through DNS or HTTP01 ports.

On a broad scale, Knative 1.0 has a quick start for users to deploy knative locally, DomainMapping for easier management and publication of services, and an administrator to install knative. Minor improvements included are pod autoscaling, message delivery enhancements, control plane components modifications, etc.

A byproduct of this release is Tekton. It is still early days for this project, but its choice of specialty being a CI/CD tool is a good turn as there is high demand for ready on-premise CI/CD systems.