[evankanderson]

One of the items that's not present at the moment (and dewitt can probably provide additional color) is the top-level developer shell which puts the pieces together with a minimal amount of client-side work. If you can see Oren's GCP Next talk (https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next18/sf/sessions/session/2204... -- which doesn't show build or events yet), you can see a deployment using `gcloud serverless` to both containers on GCF and a Knative cluster, which differ only in a single flag to gcloud to tell it which endpoint to use.

The short summary if you had a nice client shell would be:

1) Run a command to deploy. That command:

a) determines what build templates are available on your cluster and what language/tools you're using, and finds a match between the two.

b) Creates a YAML definition of your application on the Knative cluster(and stages your source if needed).

2) On the server side:

a) The build component will (optionally) trigger to take staged source and convert it to a container.

b) The serving component will create Istio routes and various pieces to schedule your app into a k8s Deployment.

   i) This Deployment will scale to zero if there's no activity, and scale back up if needed.

   ii) Scale-to-zero is accomplished via a (shared) "actuator" which stalls the incoming HTTP request until a Pod is live.

 c) Additionally, the serving components loads various observability tools like Prometheus and ELK (by default, the no-mon or lite installs skip this) so that you can see what's happening even as your pods appear and disappear.