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Knative Hands-on Workshop

Why is deploying a Knative service easier than a Kubernetess deployment?

Installing Knative

Knative requires a networking layer with an Ingress that is not part of the Knative installation itself. There are several options, Istio is one of them, another one is Kourier which is actually maintained now by the Knative project. Others are Ambassador, Contour, Glue, and Kong. Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, the OpenShift version of Knative, uses Kourier. We will use Istio in this lab, it is already available on the IBM Cloud.

The Kubernetes cluster that has been assigned to you and that you will use during this workshop is provided by the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, IKS.

IKS offers add-ons to Kubernetes, namely Istio and Knative. They will be automatically installed and managed by IBM. There is a cluster size requirement for Istio (minimum 3 worker nodes) which is also applicable to Knative because it requires Istio. The pre-provisioned clusters meet the requirement. Installing the Knative add-on automatically installs Istio if required.

  1. To install Knative, go to the ‘Add-ons’ page of your cluster: IKS add-ons

  2. Click on ‘Install’, this will inform you about the version of Istio and Knative: IKS add-ons

  3. Click ‘Install’ again, after a moment, the ‘Install’ buttons for Istio and Knative will disappear and a status for the installation will show: IKS add-ons

  4. The installation status will show a green check mark and “Normal - Addon Ready” when Knative and Istio have been installed successfully.

  5. In the IBM Cloud Shell check the Kubernetes namespaces:

    kubectl get ns

    Output:

    NAME               STATUS   AGE
default            Active   18h
ibm-cert-store     Active   18h
ibm-operators      Active   18h
ibm-system         Active   18h
istio-system       Active   12m
knative-eventing   Active   12m
knative-serving    Active   12m
knative-sources    Active   12m
kube-node-lease    Active   18h
kube-public        Active   18h
kube-system        Active   18h
tekton-pipelines   Active   12m

    Notice ‘istio-system’ and the namespaces starting with ‘knative-‘

    If you like check the pods in each of these namespaces.

Continue with the next part Deploy a Knative Service