Introduction to Knative Serving: Architecture and Core Resources

Knative Serving is built on Kubernetes and Istio to support the deployment and serving of serverless applications and functions. It is easy to get started and can scale to support advanced scenarios.

The project provides middleware primitives that enable:

Rapid deployment of serverless containers

Automatic scaling to zero

Routing and network programming via Istio components

Snapshotting of code and configuration at deployment time

Service resource : the service.serving.knative.dev custom resource automatically manages the entire lifecycle of your workload, creates related objects, and ensures routing, configuration, and revisions for each update. Traffic can be routed to the latest revision or a fixed revision.

Route resource : the route.serving.knative.dev resource maps network endpoints to one or more revisions, allowing traffic splitting, partial traffic, and named routing.

Configuration resource : the configuration.serving.knative.dev resource maintains the desired state of a deployment, separates code from configuration, follows the twelve‑factor app methodology, and creates a new revision when modified.

Revision resource : the revision.serving.knative.dev resource is an immutable snapshot of the code and configuration for each change, can be retained indefinitely, and can be automatically scaled by the service's autoscaler.