Enterprise developers face several challenges when it comes to building serverless applications, such as integrating applications and building container images from source. With more than 60 practical recipes, this cookbook helps you solve these issues with Knative―the first serverless platform natively designed for Kubernetes. Each recipe contains detailed examples and exercises, along with a discussion of how and why it works.

If you have a good understanding of serverless computing and Kubernetes core resources such as deployment, services, routes, and replicas, the recipes in this cookbook show you how to apply Knative in real enterprise application development. Authors Kamesh Sampath and Burr Sutter include chapters on autoscaling, build and eventing, observability, Knative on OpenShift, and more.

With this cookbook, you’ll learn how to:

• Efficiently build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads
• Apply Knative in real enterprise scenarios, including advanced eventing
• Monitor your Knative serverless applications effectively
• Integrate Knative with CI/CD principles, such as using pipelines for faster, more successful production deployments
• Deploy a rich ecosystem of enterprise integration patterns and connectors in Apache Camel K as Kubernetes and Knative components

Kubernetes-native platform to build, deploy, and manage your serverless workloads. Kubernetes solves a lot of cloud native application problems, but with a fair bit of complexity, especially from the perspective of deployment. To make a simple service deployment with Kubernetes, a developer has to write a minimum of two YAMLs, such as a Deployment service, and then perform the necessary plumbing work to expose the service to the outside world. The complexity makes an application developer spend more time crafting the YAMLs and other core platform tasks rather than focusing on the business need.

Knative tries to solve these Kubernetes problems by providing all essential middleware primitives via a simpler deployment model. On Knative you can deploy any modern application workload, such as monolithic applications, microservices, or even tiny functions.

Knative can run in any cloud platform that runs Kubernetes, which gives enterprises more agility and flexibility in running their serverless workloads without relying on cloud vendor–specific features.

Why We Wrote This Book

The fact there are “many” ways to do serverless has resulted in confusion among developers, with following questions being raised immediately:

• What implementation should I choose: FaaS or BaaS?
• What is the quickest way to get started?
• What are the use cases for which I can apply serverless technology?
• How do I measure the benefits?
• What tools I should use to develop the serverless applications?

We had the same set of questions when we started to explore serverless technology. The problems and challenges that we faced during our research became the crux of this cookbook. This book serves as a practical guide in how to solve those challenges, with detailed examples.

It is called a “cookbook” because the examples are structured as “recipes,” each with a Problem, Solution, and a Discussion with possible detailed explanations. As it is impossible to cover all possible serverless methods listed earlier, we decided to choose BaaS. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform that helps to run your serverless workload in the BaaS way.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for for architects and developers who have a solid understanding of Kubernetes core concepts and who wish to enhance their knowledge in building real-world applications with Knative.

About the Author

A lifelong developer advocate, community organizer, and technology evangelist, Burr Sutter is a featured speaker at technology events around the globe―from Bangalore to Brussels and Berlin to Beijing (and most parts in between)―he is currently Red Hat’s Director of Developer Experience. A Java Champion since 2005 and former president of the Atlanta Java User Group, Burr founded the DevNexus conference―now the second largest Java event in the U.S.―with the aim of making access to the world’s leading developers affordable to the developer community. When not speaking abroad, Burr is also the passionate creator and orchestrator of highly-interactive live demo keynotes at Red Hat Summit, the company’s premier annual event.

Kamesh is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, as part of his additional role as Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat -- he actively educates on Kubernetes/OpenShift, Servicemesh, and Serverless technologies . With a career spanning close to two decades, most of Kamesh’s career was with services industry helping various enterprise customers build Java-based solutions. Kamesh has been a contributor to Open Source projects for more than a decade and he now actively contributes to projects like Knative, Minishift, Eclipse Che, fabric8 etc., As part of his developer philosophy he strongly believes in LEARN MORE, DO MORE and SHARE MORE!