K8S INITIALIZER
Bootstrap Knative in 60s: Create Your Own Kubernetes Serverless Playground
The K8s Initializer makes it easy for developers to experiment with Knative
Building applications using a serverless architecture is becoming increasingly popular. Although cloud vendors may have led the initial charge with serverless products, Kubernetes is now rapidly becoming the platform on which to deploy these functions. In particular, as reported in the recent annual Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey, Knative is gaining an increasing amount of adoption.
And it’s not hard to see why. The Knative project ticks a lot of boxes for cloud native developers: it is Kubernetes-native, targets all the core stages of a serverless application’s lifecycle (build, serving, and eventing), and it has emerged from the labs at Google.
So what’s slowing down developers experimenting with the project?
Knative and the K8s Initializer
After talking to the community, we recognized that many developers wanted to experiment with Knative in an environment that mirrored their production set-up. However, configuring Knative to play nicely with their ingress controller, observability toolchain, etc. was often challenging and beyond the scope of their proof of concept.
We built the K8s Initializer to help our community build Kubernetes playgrounds so that they can evaluate other cloud native tools quickly and easily. Today we are excited to announce that we have added support for Knative to the K8s Initializer with the goal of making it easier for developers to experiment with this serverless technology.
Knative & Ingress: A challenge?
Selecting an Ingress Controller can be a challenge for many Kubernetes application developers, and adding a serverless technology like Knative only makes this selection more complicated. We’ve found that many users want to handle a single ingress solution for all of their needs: serverless, microservices, and monoliths that run in Kubernetes.
The K8s Initializer automatically configures the Ambassador Edge Stack to integrate with Knative so that the Ambassador API gateway and ingress can watch for changes in Knative configuration in your Kubernetes cluster and set up DNS, TLS and routing accordingly.
Knative & Observability
Observability is a key requirement for building cloud native applications. Serverless applications further complicate this requirement because there is no long-lived process to observe. Because of this, even when they are just evaluating Knative as a new technology, many developers want to configure Knative with their observability toolchain. This is a painful process that typically involves a lot of searching Stack Overflow and YAML writing.
With support for Knative as well as Prometheus, Jaeger, Lightstep, and the OpenTelemetry collector, the K8s Initializer simplifies this process to just a few selections in a web-interface.
Configure all-the-things with the K8s Initializer
To configure your own Kubernetes playground with your own customizations, visit https://app.getambassador.io/initializer to make your tool selections and generate pre-configured YAML. Then just apply this YAML to your Kubernetes cluster to see how all of the pieces work together in your own environment.
We’d love to hear your feedback on the new Knative support as well as any other tools or changes you’d like to see added to the K8s Initializer. To share your feedback, tweet us @ambassadorlabs or join the #K8s-Initializer channel in our Community Slack.
