Chapter 9. Knative Serving

The following basic workflow deploys a simple hello service that reads the environment variable RESPONSE and prints its output.

You can use this guide as a reference to perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on a service.

You can access autoscaling capabilities by using kn to modify Knative services without editing YAML files directly.

Use the service create and service update commands with the appropriate flags to configure the autoscaling behavior.

You can use kn to control which revisions get routed traffic on your Knative service.

Knative service supports traffic mapping, which is the mapping of revisions of the service to an allocated portion of traffic. It offers the option to create unique URLs for particular revisions and has the ability to assign traffic to the latest revision.

With every update to the configuration of the service, a new revision is created with the service route pointing all the traffic to the latest ready revision by default. You can change this behavior by defining which revision gets a portion of the traffic.

You can specify the number of concurrent requests that should be handled by each instance of an application (revision container) by adding the target annotation or the containerConcurrency field in the revision template.

Here is an example of target being used in a revision template:

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        autoscaling.knative.dev/target: 50
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: myimage

Here is an example of containerConcurrency being used in a revision template:

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: myapp
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
    spec:
      containerConcurrency: 100
      containers:
      - image: myimage

Adding a value for both target and containerConcurrency will target the target number of concurrent requests, but impose a hard limit of the containerConcurrency number of requests. For example, if the target value is 50 and the containerConcurrency value is 100, the targeted number of requests will be 50, but the hard limit will be 100.

If the containerConcurrency value is less than the target value, the target value will be tuned down, since there is no need to target more requests than the number that can actually be handled.

autoscaling.knative.dev/target: 50

containerConcurrency: 0 | 1 | 2-N

The minScale and maxScale annotations can be used to configure the minimum and maximum number of pods that can serve applications. These annotations can be used to prevent cold starts or to help control computing costs.

minScale and maxScale can be configured as follows in the revision template:

spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        autoscaling.knative.dev/minScale: "2"
        autoscaling.knative.dev/maxScale: "10"

Using these annotations in the revision template will propagate this configuration to PodAutoscaler objects.

OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrators can deploy cluster logging using a few CLI commands and the OpenShift Container Platform web console to install the Elasticsearch Operator and Cluster Logging Operator. When the operators are installed, create a ClusterLogging custom resource (CR) to schedule cluster logging pods and other resources necessary to support cluster logging. The operators are responsible for deploying, upgrading, and maintaining cluster logging.

You can configure cluster logging by modifying the ClusterLogging custom resource (CR), named instance. The CR defines a complete cluster logging deployment that includes all the components of the logging stack to collect, store and visualize logs. The Cluster Logging Operator watches the ClusterLogging Custom Resource and adjusts the logging deployment accordingly.

Administrators and application developers can view the logs of the projects for which they have view access.

OpenShift Container Platform cluster logging is designed to be used with the default configuration, which is tuned for small to medium sized OpenShift Container Platform clusters.

The installation instructions that follow include a sample ClusterLogging custom resource (CR), which you can use to create a cluster logging instance and configure your cluster logging deployment.

If you want to use the default cluster logging install, you can use the sample CR directly.

If you want to customize your deployment, make changes to the sample CR as needed. The following describes the configurations you can make when installing your cluster logging instance or modify after installation. See the Configuring sections for more information on working with each component, including modifications you can make outside of the ClusterLogging custom resource.

spec:
  logStore:
    elasticsearch:
      resources:
        limits:
          cpu:
          memory: 16Gi
        requests:
          cpu: 500m
          memory: 16Gi
      type: "elasticsearch"
  collection:
    logs:
      fluentd:
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu:
            memory:
          requests:
            cpu:
            memory:
        type: "fluentd"
  visualization:
    kibana:
      resources:
        limits:
          cpu:
          memory:
        requests:
          cpu:
          memory:
     type: kibana
  curation:
    curator:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 200Mi
        requests:
          cpu: 200m
          memory: 200Mi
      type: "curator"

  spec:
    logStore:
      type: "elasticsearch"
      elasticsearch:
        nodeCount: 3
        storage:
          storageClassName: "gp2"
          size: "200G"

  spec:
    logStore:
      type: "elasticsearch"
      elasticsearch:
        nodeCount: 3
        storage: {}

  spec:
    curation:
    type: "curator"
    resources:
    curator:
      schedule: "30 3 * * *"

apiVersion: "logging.openshift.io/v1"
kind: "ClusterLogging"
metadata:
  name: "instance"
  namespace: "openshift-logging"
spec:
  managementState: "Managed"
  logStore:
    type: "elasticsearch"
    elasticsearch:
      nodeCount: 3
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 32Gi
        requests:
          cpu: 3
          memory: 32Gi
      storage: {}
      redundancyPolicy: "SingleRedundancy"
  visualization:
    type: "kibana"
    kibana:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 1Gi
        requests:
          cpu: 500m
          memory: 1Gi
      replicas: 1
  curation:
    type: "curator"
    curator:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 200Mi
        requests:
          cpu: 200m
          memory: 200Mi
      schedule: "*/5 * * * *"
  collection:
    logs:
      type: "fluentd"
      fluentd:
        resources:
          limits:
            memory: 1Gi
          requests:
            cpu: 200m
            memory: 1Gi

With OpenShift Container Platform cluster logging, the logs that your applications write to the console are collected in Elasticsearch. The following procedure outlines how to apply these capabilities to applications deployed by using Knative Serving.

After you create a serverless application, the serverless application is displayed in the Topology view of the Developer perspective. The application revision is represented by the node and the serverless resource service is indicated by a quadrilateral around the node.

Any new change in the code or the service configuration triggers a revision, a snapshot of the code at a given time. For a service, you can manage the traffic between the revisions of the service by splitting and routing it to the different revisions as required.