README.md

Route CRDs

All routing in Knative Serving is done through the Route CRD, which provides a network endpoint for a user's service/app (which consists of a series of software and configuration Revisions over time). The Route provides a long-lived, stable, named, HTTP-addressable endpoint that is backed by one or more Revisions. The default configuration is for the Route to automatically direct traffic to the latest revision created by a Configuration. For more about Routes, read this doc.

Currently we use Istio to program the network for Routes, but we don't exclude other implementations if they can provide similar functionality.

Underlying implementation using Istio

Shared Gateway for all Knative Routes

Currently all Routes can receive external traffic through a shared Istio Gateway. Many of our users may already be Istio users. In order to avoid conflict with users' Gateway settings, we use a different Gateway than the default istio-ingressgateway. In the future we should probably provide a way for the users to select what the Gateway they use -- and how Knative would expect such Gateway to look like.

For each Route, a VirtualService and Service

A valid Route object, when reconciled by Knative Route controller, will generate the following objects:

• A VirtualService to realize the routing from the Gateway knative-ingress-gateway to the traffic target referenced in the Route.

• A Service with the same name as the Route, so that we can access the Route using <route-name>.<route-namespace>.svc.<cluster-domain-name>. This Service has no Pod, we use it solely to have a domain name and a cluster IP to be used in the VirtualService. The value of <cluster-domain-name> depends on a domain name specified during the installation of the cluster. If no custom domain name was specified, then cluster.local should be used as in the following example:

  <route-name>.<route-namespace>.svc.cluster.local

  otherwise cluster's custom domain name should be used:

  <route-name>.<route-namespace>.svc.real-domain-name.com

For example, if we have two Knative Revisions hello-world-01 and hello-world-02, and one Route hello-world that directs traffic to both Revisions, the resources would look like:

Routing in the presence of Inactive Revisions (aka 0→1)

In the case of inactive Revisions, a Route would direct requests through the Service activator-service, with enough information in the headers so that the Service activator-service Service can activate a Revision before relaying the traffic to it.

From the same scenario of the previous example, if the Revision hello-world-01 becomes inactive due to lack of traffic, the resources would look like:

Note that while we still see a hello-world-01 Service in this case, it does not have any Pod until activated by the activator.

After Revision hello-world-02 also becomes inactive due to lack of traffic, the resources would look like:

If any activation happens, Revisions becomes active again and traffic will be adjusted to route directly to the Revision, without going through the Service activator-service.