ahh so you just worry about your business logic, which will be a bunch of 'functions', and knative will take care of routing, deployment, load etc. ?

It isn't limited to functions. Knative can run containerees, or with a build system take full app code and deploy it as a container.

so it can be anything really ... hmm

I think Knative (and the scale to zero in particular) are best suited for request/response or event-delivery workloads. So you wouldn't want to run (for example) memcache or mysql under knative. FaaS and (HTTP application) PaaS are both good matches.

I think it's an open question whether a PaaS like Google Dataflow is a good match or not. It will certainly require more planning, but I think it's doable.

Yeah but don't forget this is a higher abstraction on top of microservices. I think the big take away here is that if your app falls into the patten of 80% of modern apps (can't remember where is saw that number, don't quote me :) and is split properly you can have all your 'ops' part as configuration.

I would say that yes, that is a good statement of the vision that the contributors share.

Got it! thank you! It's actually very interesting ...

You still need a Kubernetes cluster running though, right?

Yes ... from the install guide : "To get started with Knative, you need a Kubernetes cluster."

https://github.com/knative/docs/tree/master/install

This is what I am trying to figure out too. Is Knative standalone, or is it running inside your K8 cluster, or do you build a K8 cluster and run this in it exclusively?

Knative installs into a Kubernetes cluster. Knative as it stands is not multi-tenant, so if you need to isolate workloads, you will need distinct Kubernetes clusters.

I think it's mostly pods on your k8 cluster ... see the link to the install guide above

It has software, yes, that of course runs in pods, but ..

It's a whole lot of infrastructure to support a PaaS / FaaS workflow. From building and routing/serving/tracing to complex event driven stuff.

It's fully k8s native (hence the name, I reckon), and it uses CRDs. Which is basically k8s's DSL for describing anything. Basically a k8s-standard for k8s plugins with schema, validation, schema change management, kubectl support, etc.