Before we get into the details, let’s set the scene. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about Google Cloud Platform’s managed service based on an open source project called Knative. The project was started to allow for quicker development of Kubernetes applications without the need to understand the complex Kubernetes concepts they use. With this service, Google installs and manages Knative serving inside your Anthos GKE cluster. One of the benefits of using Knative with Anthos instead of open source Knative is that Google’s automation and site reliability engineers handle all installation and maintenance. Anthos integrates with numerous GCP services like Cloud Load Balancing (https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing), Cloud Armor (https://cloud.google.com/armor), Cloud CDN (https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/overview), and many others, making an enterprise-ready Knative a reality.
We have already discussed Kubernetes in chapter 3, so we understand how complex the installation and maintenance of it can be. This problem is solved for us with Google Kubernetes Engine. In addition to Kubernetes, we still need to know how to run and operate cloud native applications. What Knative does is abstract those implementation details and allow you to serve your serverless container-based workloads on any Kubernetes cluster.