Serverless Kubernetes combines the flexibility of containers with the operational simplicity of serverless computing, abstracting away node management and scaling based on traffic.

Step 1 — Knative Serving

Knative Serving provides scale-to-zero capabilities, request-driven compute, and simplified deployments on top of standard Kubernetes.

service.yamlyaml
apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hello-world
  namespace: default
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - image: gcr.io/knative-samples/helloworld-go
          env:
            - name: TARGET
              value: "Knative User"

Step 2 — Node Auto-scaling with Karpenter

Karpenter is an open-source node provisioning project built for Kubernetes that rapidly provisions right-sized nodes in response to unschedulable pods.

Karpenter vs Cluster Autoscaler

  • Group-less: Karpenter provisions raw compute resources directly, bypassing static Auto Scaling Groups.
  • Speed: Karpenter can provision new nodes in seconds.
  • Cost Efficiency: It bin-packs pods and selects the cheapest instance types available.