A quick look through Knative and serverless

1. What is Knative?
@christianposta

2. Christian Posta
Chief Architect, cloud application development
Twitter: @christianposta
Blog: http://blog.christianposta.com
Slides: http://slideshare.net/ceposta
• Author “Microservices for Java developers”
and “Introducing Istio Service Mesh”
• Committer/contributor lots of open-source projects
• Blogger, speaker, mentor, leader

4. Kubernetes
Established primitives for deploying and managing
container workloads at scale

5. Istio
How workloads interact with each other over
the network in a secure, reliable, observable way

6. Knative
“PaaS” like abstractions on top of Kubernetes that
leverage Istio and raise the level of abstraction for
specifying, running, and modifying applications

8. Is Knative “Severless”?

9. Well… WTF is “serverless”?
@christianposta

10. @christianposta
Serverless: outsourcing core infrastructure services to
cloud providers and stitching it all together through APIs
(and functions) to deliver business value

11. Service Full?
https://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/from-serverless-to-service-full-how-the-role-of-devops-is-evolving

12. ● Per-request billing / pay as you go
● Typically accessed via APIs
● You don’t own it or care how it’s implemented
● Agreed SLAs
● Explicit choice, with tradeoffs, to not own the technology to
run your business
Service-full

13. ● New, smaller unit of compute
● Executed on demand, typically in response to events
● Used to glue together APIs, services
● Concurrency, scale, spin up/spin down, etc done by platform
● High utilization rates (wrt billing – pay for what you use)
Functions (FaaS)

14. ● Agility
● Flexibility (opinionatedness)
● Cost/utilization
● Technology ownership
● Complexity
Tradeoffs across these (at least spectrums):

15. When to use Serverless, Functions,
Microservices, Monoliths?
@christianposta
^^^ Save this for after 

16. Back to Knative…
@christianposta

17. Knative is building blocks for a PaaS
@christianposta

18. Knative operates on containers. Those
containers can be anything. Can they be
functions? Can you build FaaS on Knative?
@christianposta

19. Let’s take a look at one of the “building
blocks”…
@christianposta

20. Let’s take a look at these building blocks
@christianposta

21. Knative Serving: Allow our compute utilization
to be driven by request load (think:
autoscaler)
and scale to zero when no load

22. Knative Eventing: Composing services and
compute resources via events to build staged
event driven architectures

23. Knative Build: Converting source packages
into runnable containers

24. Knative Pipelines: Leverage Knative Build and
Knative Events to abstract away CI/CD
implementations on top of Kubernetes

25. Knative Caching: Simple API for providing
caching to Knative components (TBD - still
being sorted out).

26. Those most mature of the building blocks is
Knative serving
@christianposta

27. @christianposta

28. @christianposta

29. @christianposta

31. @christianposta

34. Thanks!
BTW: Hand drawn diagrams made with Paper by FiftyThree.com 
Twitter: @christianposta
Blog: http://blog.christianposta.com
Email: christian@redhat.com
Slides: http://slideshare.net/cepostaFollow up links:
• http://blog.christianposta.com
• http://istio.io
• http://envoyproxy.io
• http://linkerd.io
• http://consul.io
• http://bit.ly/istio-tutorial
• http://blog.christianposta.com/istio-workshop/slides/