How Do I Get Started with Knative?

Start at knative.dev. The homepage gives you two direct paths: Try the tutorial for a first hands-on experience, or Install Knative on your cluster if you already have Kubernetes and want to run it yourself. Both are linked from the top of the page, alongside the main documentation.

Choose your entry point

What Knative actually is

Knative is described on the site as "the easiest way to build and run serverless workloads on Kubernetes," built by the community for modern cloud-native teams. It provides building blocks for creating modern, cloud-based applications.

It is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project, which matters if you need to justify the dependency to a team — it is not a single-vendor tool.

The two components you will work with

Knative has two main components, and the site is explicit that they work together to automate and manage tasks and applications:

• Serving — handles HTTP-first workloads. It serves and scales HTTP/2, gRPC, and MCP traffic.
• Eventing — routes and handles asynchronous events the same way Serving handles HTTP. It includes event integrations that extract events from existing services or let you define your own, plus Kubernetes-integrated Trigger handlers from the event broker.

If your goal is function-as-a-service, the site quotes Kelsey Hightower: you can build on top of Knative, "which has a serving framework, meaning when a request comes in you can scale a workload up and down on demand."

Why serverless containers instead of plain Kubernetes

The site's framing is that serverless gives you a vocabulary for expressing web and event-based applications "without getting mired in the details of scaling and infrastructure libraries." Behind the scenes, Knative optimizes your deployment to match demand. That is the trade you are making: you describe the workload, Knative handles the scaling behavior.

A concrete first task

A reasonable first exercise, given what the site documents:

1. Open the tutorial from the homepage and work through it to see a workload scale on demand.
2. Install Knative on your own cluster using the install link.
3. Pick one of the two components and go deep — Serving if your traffic is HTTP request/response, Eventing if you need to react to events from Kafka, CI/CD toolchains, or other services.

The case studies on the site point in both directions: one describes bridging Apache Kafka and CI/CD toolchain events through Eventing, another describes using Eventing to set an operational boundary for ML training infrastructure. Those are useful reference points when deciding which component your first real workload belongs to.

Where to go next

The documentation covers how Knative works with Kubernetes and the underlying ideas behind containers and serverless infrastructure. Read that before installing if you are evaluating rather than building — it will tell you faster than a tutorial whether the model fits your team.