What is knative-minikube?

This repo is a step-by-step guide for running "serverless" applications on your own computer. Instead of deploying code to a cloud provider like AWS or Google Cloud, it walks you through setting up a local environment where your app automatically spins up when someone visits its URL and shuts down when traffic stops. The project uses two tools called Minikube and Knative to make this happen. At a high level, Minikube creates a mini version of a Kubernetes cluster running inside a virtual machine on your laptop. Kubernetes is a system for managing and running containerized applications. On top of that, you install Knative, which adds the "serverless" layer. This means instead of your app running constantly and eating up memory while waiting for visitors, Knative listens for incoming web requests, boots your app up on the fly to handle the traffic, and then turns it back off when things go quiet. The guide also sets up a networking component called Kourier to route incoming web traffic to your app. This is built for developers or hobbyists who want to try out serverless concepts without paying for cloud infrastructure. If you are a founder or technical project manager curious about how serverless scaling works, you can follow these instructions to see it in action. The guide even includes a sample "Hello World" app so you can watch the system boot up a pod (a running instance of your code) when you visit the URL and then terminate that pod a few moments after you leave. One notable thing about this setup is that it demonstrates the core appeal of serverless: scale to zero. You can literally watch the application containers disappear when traffic stops and reappear when traffic resumes, which means you are not consuming compute resources when nobody is using your app. However, the instructions were verified in mid-2020. The README doesn't go into detail about whether these steps still work with the newest versions of these tools, so you may need to troubleshoot if software versions have changed since then.