What is Knative?

Knative (pronounced kay-nay-tiv) is an open source community project which adds components for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications to Kubernetes. The serverless cloud computing model can lead to increased developer productivity and reduced operational costs.

Knative eliminates the tasks of provisioning and managing servers. This lets developers focus on their code without having to worry about setting up complex infrastructure. This benefit is extended even further if entire application components are incorporated from a third party through Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), rather than being written in-house.

The Knative serverless environment lets you deploy code to a Kubernetes platform, like Red Hat OpenShift. With Knative, you create a service by packaging your code as a container image and handing it to the system. Your code only runs when it needs to, with Knative starting and stopping instances automatically. Resources aren’t consumed unless your code needs to do something. Operations costs can be reduced—you can pay for cloud-based compute time as it’s needed instead of running and managing your own servers all the time.

Knative consists of 3 primary components:

• Build - A flexible approach to building source code into containers.
• Serving - Enables rapid deployment and automatic scaling of containers through a request-driven model for serving workloads based on demand.
• Eventing - An infrastructure for consuming and producing events to stimulate applications. Applications can be triggered by a variety of sources, such as events from your own applications, cloud services from multiple providers, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems, and Red Hat AMQ streams.

Knative allows serverless applications to be deployed and run on any Kubernetes platform, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Knative installs on OpenShift using Operators.

Knative is maintained by an open source community, including companies like Red Hat, Google, and IBM in collaboration with a variety of startups. Open source software limits the potential for vendor lock-in, shifting the power from IT providers to the people using it.

Red Hat® OpenShift® Serverless is a service based on the open source Knative project. It provides an enterprise-grade serverless platform which brings portability and consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

OpenShift Serverless can help deliver a complete serverless app dev and deployment experience by integrating apps with other OpenShift Container Platform services, like OpenShift Service Mesh and cluster monitoring.

Using Red Hat OpenShift Serverless can also make things easier for operations because it installs easily on OpenShift, has been tested with other Red Hat products, and comes with access to award-winning support.