Knative 1.11: Serverless on Kubernetes Evolution

Introduction

Knative 1.11, released on June 15, 2023, is most relevant if you’re operating Kubernetes in production and want fewer surprises. This post walks through the highlights and the kinds of operational scenarios where the changes tend to matter first.

Serving Improvements

• Revision management improvements provide better handling of application versions.
• Traffic splitting enhancements enable more sophisticated canary and blue-green deployments.
• Networking improvements provide better ingress and egress configuration.
• Security enhancements enable better authentication and authorization.

Eventing Enhancements

1. Event sources expansion adds support for more event sources and triggers.
2. Broker improvements provide better event routing and filtering.
3. Channel enhancements enable better event delivery and reliability.
4. Sink bindings improvements simplify connecting applications to event sources.

Autoscaling Improvements

• Scale-to-zero optimizations reduce resource usage for idle applications.
• Scaling accuracy improvements provide better response to traffic patterns.
• Concurrency management enables better handling of concurrent requests.
• Metrics collection provides better visibility into scaling behavior.

Developer Experience

• CLI improvements simplify application deployment and management.
• Templates expansion provides more function templates for common use cases.
• Documentation enhancements provide better guides and examples.
• Testing tools enable easier application development and validation.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/knative/serving/releases/download/knative-v1.11.0/serving-crds.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/knative/serving/releases/download/knative-v1.11.0/serving-core.yaml

Deploy a Knative service:

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hello-world
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: gcr.io/knative-samples/helloworld-go
        env:
        - name: TARGET
          value: "World"

Summary

Knative 1.11 provides teams with powerful serverless capabilities for building event-driven applications on Kubernetes.