VMware is infusing the Knative Project into its rapidly expanding Tanzu platform to provide a serverless experience for the creation of applications. The move expands VMware’s serverless ambitions and shines a positive light on the Kubernetes-focused abstraction layer.

The specific VMware launch is a public beta of its Cloud Native Runtimes for Tanzu. It acts as a further abstraction layer on top of Tanzu’s core Kubernetes focus to more quickly get event-based cloud-native applications up and running in a Kubernetes managed environment.

The vendor is specific in describing its “serverless” implementation as being an “abstraction of the infrastructure underlying containers, pods, and other Kubernetes resources. … It gives developers and application operators … a simplified way to manipulate Kubernetes to accomplish serverless use cases through Knative.”

Craig McLuckie, VP of research and development at VMware, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the integration allows Tanzu and its Kubernetes ecosystem to better deal with event-driven architectures.

“There's obviously a gap in the Kubernetes ecosystem. It was not really optimized for that class of workload and we see Knative as being a really important technology through the lens of the open source community that enables us to bring those types of capabilities to the Kubernetes ecosystem,” McLuckie said.

Broadly, Knative provides an open source set of components that allow for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. It’s targeted at unchaining current serverless development platforms that are tied to their respective cloud parents. These would include hosted services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Knative is currently focused on two specific functions: serving and eventing. Serving is targeted at reducing developer effort to manage autoscaling, networking, and the rollout of stateless services on Kubernetes. The eventing focus is on exposing event routing that is used to trigger a function between on-cluster and off-cluster components.

McLuckie admitted that while Knative is not a “complete end-to-end solution for serverless,” it does already fill a role in allowing for more fine-grained control over a Kubernetes environment. This is mostly due to its ability to take advantage of the scaling-to-zero model that is a key benefit to serverless platforms.

“Kubernetes was one step in that it gave us a normalized infrastructure abstraction. Knative is another step in that it gives us the ability to run event-driven workloads and scale-to-zero workloads,” McLuckie explained. “It's not the last step, it's not the only step in the direction of serverless. The next steps will also be important around how the community starts to converge around the sort of build technologies that continuous integration technologies bring along. ... From our perspective, there's a lot of steps that still need to be taken.”

McLuckie, who was one of the original product leads for Google’s Compute Engine platform and co-founded the Kubernetes Project, views Knative development as the next step in the Kubernetes evolution.

“Once you have that normalized infrastructure abstraction that works everywhere, it creates just tremendous innovation opportunities because you no longer have to build a Knative for on prem, you wouldn't have to build a Knative for Azure, or to build a Knative for Amazon, you can just have one that runs everywhere,” McLuckie said.

McLuckie also explained that the new offering furthers VMware’s vision of Tanzu as being more than just a VMware-centric platform. He noted that while Tanzu was constructed to work best within VMware, “Tanzu is broader than that.”

“We want to make sure that Tanzu enables you to bring Kubernetes to other environments. And we also want to make sure that if Kubernetes exists in other environments Tanzu can still create value in that by bringing things like the Cloud Native Runtime capabilities, by bringing things like Mission Control so that you have a very rich set of tools that unlock value on any Kubernetes,” McLuckie said.

Tanzu is VMware’s managed Kubernetes platform. The vendor has been quickly spreading the Tanzu service across most of its offerings.

VMware's Knative integration also shines some positive light on the project following months of trepidation. Google last year moved to place the Knative Project under an open governance model. This included the election of a steering committee to oversee the direction of the project. That 5-member committee has two members from IBM/Red Hat and VMware and a single member from Google.

That move was significant as it followed Google’s controversial decision to move the Istio service mesh project under a more controlled Open Usage Commons (OUC) program instead of into a more formalized open source group like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google explained the move was based on the need to protect the trademark of open source projects.

McLuckie was one of those that questioned Google’s move, but sees a more promising path for Knative.

“We've been working very hard with the broader open source ecosystem to make sure that the Knative Project is flowing under neutral governance and can be innovated on at a pace that meets the needs of our customers,” McLuckie said. “We will continue to champion community-centric open source communities and governance, and we've certainly seen good progress on Knative versus where it was. I think everyone was a little bit concerned but we're starting to feel a lot better about the direction it's taking.”

That clarity and support could help hasten what has been the Knative Project’s glacial innovation pace. The project has been on the table for nearly three years, but only just recently hit its 0.21 release.