[evankanderson]

Hi, Knative team member here.

What you're describing with injecting outbound proxies is definitely something that Istio does in service mesh mode. When Knative launched 0.1 over a year ago, we had a pretty hard dependency on Istio. We heard a lot of feedback from users who weren't ready to make that much commitment, and as of 0.3 (last December or so), Knative supports multiple pluggable HTTP routers, including Gloo, Ambassador and Kourier.

If you aren't using Istio in mesh mode, Knative only controls inbound HTTP networking to your container instances, which it uses to implement scale-from-zero, concurrency-based-balancing, and percentage based version rollout. Outbound network is completely unaffected, except that containers may be shut down when they are no longer handing a request.