Knative: Serverless Workloads with Ville Aikas

Infrastructure software is having a renaissance.

Cloud providers offer a wide range of deployment tools, including virtual machines, managed Kubernetes clusters, standalone container instances, and serverless functions. Kubernetes has standardized the container orchestration layer and created a thriving community. The Kubernetes community gives the cloud providers a neutral ground to collaborate on projects that benefit everyone.

The two forces of cloud providers and Kubernetes have led to massive improvements in software quality and development practices over the last few years. But one downside of the current ecosystem is that many more developers learn how to operate a Kubernetes cluster than perhaps is necessary. “Serverless” tools are at a higher level than Kubernetes, and can improve developer productivity–but a risk of using a serverless tool is the potential for lock-in, and a lack of portability.

Knative is an open-source serverless platform from Google built on top of Kubernetes. Ville Aikas is a senior staff engineer at Google who has worked at the company for eleven years. With his experience, Ville brings a rare perspective to the subjects of Kubernetes, serverless, and the infrastructure lessons of Google. Ville joins the show to discuss Knative, the motivation for building it, and the future of “serverless” infrastructure.

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.


Sponsors

Datadog is a cloud-scale monitoring platform for infrastructure and applications. And with Datadog’s new Live Container view, you can see every container’s health, resource consumption, and running processes in real time. See for yourself by starting a free trial and get a free Datadog T-shirt! softwareengineeringdaily.com/datadog.

Deploy infrastructure faster; simplify life cycle maintenance for your servers; give IT the ability to deliver infrastructure to developers as a service like the public cloud. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/hpe and learn about how HPE OneView can improve your infrastructure operations.

Triplebyte is a company that connects engineers with top tech companies. We’re running an experiment and our hypothesis is that Software Engineering Daily listeners will do well above average on the quiz. Go to triplebyte.com/sedaily.

OpenShift is a Kubernetes platform from Red Hat. OpenShift takes the Kubernetes container orchestration system and adds features that let you build software more quickly. OpenShift includes service discovery, CI/CD, built-in monitoring and health management, and scalability. With OpenShift, you avoid getting locked into any particular cloud provider. Check out OpenShift from RedHat, by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com/redhat.

Software Daily

Software Daily

 
Subscribe to Software Daily, a curated newsletter featuring the best and newest from the software engineering community.