Installation extensions catalog

This catalog lists ingress, messaging, and integration options and their installation destinations. It is not an installation sequence or a compatibility matrix. Follow the selected implementation's requirements and guidance.

Knative utilizes the existing infrastructure installed on your cluster and provides a developer-facing interface between similar components. Serving supports pluggable network ingress routes; Eventing supports pluggable message transports such as Kafka and RabbitMQ.

For LLM deployments, consider the KServe platform. KServe is a Kubernetes-native model serving platform built on Knative Serving designed for production LLM deployments.

Knative supports installing additional plugins after the initial installation, so your initial choices do not lock you in. Changing an ingress or message transport is a separate operational change: consult implementation-specific migration guidance before changing a running installation.

Networking plugins

If you do not have an ingress that meets the requirements, Knative provides net-kourier, a lightweight HTTP routing implementation.

Option	Description and destination
Istio	Service mesh from Istio. See Installing Istio for Knative.
Contour	General-purpose ingress with a goal of enabling multi-team delegation. See Contour and the networking section of your component installation guide.
Gateway API	Kubernetes Gateway API. Knative integration is beta; see Operator Gateway API configuration.
Higress (third-party integration)	Traffic governance, authentication, WAF protection, and observability with WASM plugin extensibility. See Higress and Higress: A Best Practice for Knative Ingress Gateway.

Note

The Higress integration is not managed by the Knative community.

Messaging plugins

Knative has a lightweight in-memory messaging implementation if you do not already have a solution. Other options include:

Option	Description and destination
Kafka	Distributed event streaming platform from Apache Kafka. See Install Kafka for Knative.
RabbitMQ	Messaging and streaming broker from RabbitMQ. See Install RabbitMQ for Knative.
NATS	Event streaming platform from NATS. Consult the implementation-specific project documentation.

Ordering, throughput, persistence, and migration behavior depend on the Knative implementation and its configuration, not just the underlying transport's name. See Eventing Broker types before choosing a Broker.

Integration plugins

Option	Purpose and installation guide
cert-manager	Request TLS certificates for HTTPS connections. See Install cert-manager.

Return to Installing Knative to choose a component installation route.