TL;DR
- Knative is a cloud-native serverless framework for Kubernetes environments.
- It is created and open-sourced by Google with contributions from other companies (Pivotal, IBM, Lyft, etc.).
- Unlike current serverless frameworks (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, …), Knative eliminates cloud vendor lock-in.
- Knative usese Kubernetes for container orchestration and Istio service mesh for routing, load balancing, etc.
- Knative has three components: Build, Serving, and Eventing.
- Build: builds containers from source code on Kubernetes (on-cluster container builds).
- Eventing: enables a scalable event-driven system for management of events between producers and consumers.
- Serving: provides an abstraction for deployment, gradual rollouts, autoscaling, and configuring Istio components.
- Cloud Run is a managed Knative service offered by Google Cloud.