Understand Knative¶

Explore how Knative works, how its parts fit together, and the considerations behind application and platform choices. These pages provide background, not a required detour before every task.

See the whole system¶

Start with the Knative technical overview for the problems Knative addresses and the relationship between Functions, Serving, Eventing, and Kubernetes. The component integration section connects application development, HTTP services, and event routing.

Understand Serving behavior¶

Serving architecture: the resources and controllers involved in running an application.
Request flow: the path a request takes through networking, the Activator, and application pods.
Services and Revisions: how application configuration relates to immutable versions.
How concurrency affects autoscaling: soft targets, hard limits, spare capacity, and scale-from-zero trade-offs. The autoscaling overview routes to related tasks and settings; load balancing explains request routing and capacity.

Use the linked settings pages when you need exact configuration details; use how-to guides when you are ready to change an application.

Understand event-driven applications¶

Event Mesh: how producers and consumers participate in event routing.
Brokers and Channels: the routing abstractions you will encounter in Eventing.
Sources and sinks: where events come from and where they go.
Duck typing: how shared interfaces allow different resource types to work together.

The Broker implementation catalog links to implementation-specific information. Check those pages and the delivery support tables before assuming the same behavior across transports.

Understand the Functions development model¶

How Knative Functions fits together connects function projects, container images, deployed Services, templates, and build choices. Use the Functions overview to find related tasks and command reference. The CLI tools overview explains the roles of kubectl, kn, and func so you can choose the tool that fits your work.

Understand platform responsibilities and security¶

Administrator overview: responsibilities, cluster-wide configuration, and the application/platform boundary.
Choosing an installation method: YAML/Operator responsibilities, customization, and GitOps trade-offs.
Threat model: security assumptions and boundaries.
Serving encryption overview: the communication paths that encryption configuration addresses.

Continue with a guided learning experience, a specific task, or technical reference, according to what you need next.