IBM’s Cloud Kubernetes Service Gains ‘Experimental Managed’ Knative Support

IBM launched quasi-support for Knative as an “experimental managed add-on” to its Cloud Kubernetes Service. The move shows growing confidence in the commercialization of the Kubernetes-based serverless architecture. The support will allow organizations to deploy Knative in a Kubernetes cluster using a one-click install via the Cloud Kubernetes Service user interface. The deployment model also works for the Istio service mesh platform. Doug Davies, offering manager for Knative at IBM, did warn in a blog post that the implementation is still in the “experimental stage since the project is continuing to mature and evolve.” But, he added that as the maturation occurs, “IBM Cloud will provide even deeper integration with the rest of the IBM Cloud platform.” Jason McGee, vice president and CTO for IBM’s Cloud Platform, told attendees at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 event in Seattle that Knative was an important project in unifying the dozens of serverless platforms that have flooded the market.