Knative goal is to make developers more productive by providing higher level abstractions (CRDs) on top of Kubernetes. It solves common problems like stand up a scalable, secure, stateless service in seconds, connecting disparate systems together. Knative also brings serverless deployment models to Kubernetes.

Container storage is ephemeral, it goes away when the container does. Because of this, storage needs to be independent of the container in order to live beyond the container. In Kubernetes, volumes provide the abstraction to decouple storage from the pod’s containers. When we attach a volume to a pod it provides a directory mounted inside the pod’s containers so that we can access files. There are many different volume types.

Network policies allow to secure a Kubernetes network. They allow you to control what traffic is allowed to come in or out from your pod. The Kubernetes network model specifies that every pods gets its own IP address, containers within a pod share the IP address and can freely communicate with each other. Pods can communicate with all other pods in the cluster using pod IP addresses (without NAT). This style of network is sometimes referred to as a “flat network”.

Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNB) is a specification to transform your application source code into an OCI image. It was initiated by Pivotal and Heroku in 2018, and recently moved from Sandbox to Incubation by the CNCF. If you are interested in how it compares to other popular alternatives like Jib or s2i head over to https://buildpacks.io/features/

Kustomize is a command line tool that lets you customize application configuration in a template free way. In Kubernetes world the declarative way is the recommended approach to create the resources. However, it is difficult to use only kubectl to follow the declarative way, another tools are required like, like Helm, Kapitan, ktmpl. The full list of these tools you can find here

jgitver is a very useful tool to automatically compute the version of your project leveraging the git history. It does not pollute the project’s git history like the maven release plugin

jgitver has support for both Maven and Gradle. In this blog post we are going to use Gradle.