Knative is a CNCF-graduated open-source platform built on Kubernetes that adds serverless primitives — automatic scaling, traffic management, and event-driven messaging — to any cluster. It solves the gap between raw Kubernetes and managed FaaS platforms by giving teams cloud-run-style developer ergonomics without vendor lock-in. The key mental model is that Knative Serving manages how workloads run (revisions, scale-to-zero, traffic routing), while Knative Eventing manages what triggers them (CloudEvents, sources, brokers, and triggers); the two components are independent and can be deployed separately.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 18 focused tables and 122 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Knative Serving Core Resources (CRDs)
The four primary Custom Resource Definitions of Knative Serving define the full lifecycle of a serverless workload. Understanding how Service, Configuration, Route, and Revision relate to each other is the foundation for everything else in Knative.
| Resource | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1kind: Servicemetadata: name: hellospec: template: spec: containers: - image: ghcr.io/knative/helloworld-go:latest | • Top-level CRD that automatically manages a Route and Configuration together • every update creates a new Revision | |
kind: Configurationspec: template: spec: containers: - image: myapp:v2 | • Maintains the desired state for a deployment following Twelve-Factor principles • each mutation produces a new immutable Revision | |
kubectl get revisions# hello-00001, hello-00002 | • Point-in-time snapshot of code and configuration • immutable, auto-scaled individually, retained for rollback or traffic splitting |