[isdal]

I'm the engineering manager at Google responsible for both Knative and App Engine Flex. What we heard from a lot of customers is that they want a serverless / App Engine Flex-like experience but one that works multi-cloud or in hybrid/on-prem setups. The goal for Knative is to fill that need, especially for people that already use kubernetes. That being said, App Engine Flex is a solid GA service that provides a fully managed experience and runs huge services today. Knative is not there yet but is getting better by the day.

[wikibob]

I want to love AppEngine Flex, but it consistently takes 10+ minutes to deploy. Is this something that we can ever expect a fix for?

[isdal]

Network/Load-balancer programming is embarrassingly slow on Flex. We have long term projects in place that will improve it but I can't give any dates here.

Short term we have a few tactical features in the pipeline. In the next few weeks we are rolling our "parallel build and deploy" which moved the docker build to run parallel with LB programming. Depending on your build that saves a few minutes.

When doing development I usually just replace an existing version by deploying with:

gcloud app deploy --version <my-dev-version>

This keeps the same LB and VMs as before and does a gradual container swap. It is not safe for production but definitely helps when iterating.

[psankar]

This is exactly the reason why we went away from appengine flex to AWS Beanstalk. As much as a google fan I am, this is unacceptably high and there seem to be no interest by Google to reduce this. Beanstalk isn't that great either but better than appengine flex when it comes to the deployment wait times.

[happythought]

I’ve read through this whole thread and everyone is struggling to understand the primary use case for knative. Your comment is the most clear.

Please please please at the forefront of all docs, presentations, and blogs put something like this:

Knative’s primary use case is for you to provide your own cloud-neutral, on-prem, or hybrid-cloud serverless platform built on top of kubernetes.

[jacques_chester]

It's probably harder for us to dig ourselves out of the various deep dives and rabbit holes we've been over the past few months.

I think there are two parts to the story here. One is what Knative is for, what it can do. That's some version of "source code to event-driven system on any Kubernetes system without the tears". As with previous Big Changes there will be a cottage industry of explanations, and that is fine.

The second part of the story is: who is working on it. And that's the underrated part for me so far. You see Pivotal and Red Hat -- we are fierce competitors -- working on the same project with Googlers, IBMers and SAPers. You find folks who work on riff and OpenWhisk sitting in calls with engineers who've worked on Google Cloud Functions comparing notes on problems and solutions.

I have sat in working groups where experiences have been shared from Cloud Foundry, OpenWhisk and Google App Engine in the space of 5 minutes. I've sat in other calls with teams comparing notes on Buildpacks and S2I, Concourse and OpenShift ImageStreams ... it goes on and on.

The big story here is that Google were able to catalyse a conversation that would be very difficult to start any other way. People from contributing organisations are busily sorting out common ground that will let everyone to move past this level of abstraction much quicker than would otherwise be the case.

[isdal]

Thanks! In my mind a key goal for Knative is to: "Free customers from serverless lock-in through industry-wide portability" I think I like your version better so maybe I should start using that :-)

We are still very early in the process so code (and comms) are a bit rough. Really appreciate your feedback and we will work to clarify things over the next few days.

[otterley]

How would you anticipate seeing this work in, say, AWS?

[isdal]

Knative depends on Kubernetes and should run well on any reasonable Kubernetes setup. I haven't tested Knative on AWS since I'm not a customer there :-)

We were thrilled to see Microsoft contribute instructions for Azure (https://github.com/knative/docs/issues/208) but we have not heard much from Amazon yet.