Knative supports canary releases. You can deploy a canary release to split traffic between two application versions based on a specified ratio. This topic describes how to deploy a canary release for a Knative Service.

Prerequisites

Deploy Knative:

  • If you want to deploy Knative in a Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) cluster, see Deploy Knative.
  • If you want to deploy Knative in a serverless Kubernetes (ASK) cluster, see Enable Knative.

Step 1: Create a Knative Service

  1. Log on to the ACK console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane of the ACK console, click Clusters.
  3. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that you want to manage and click the name of the cluster or click Details in the Actions column. The details page of the cluster appears.
  4. In the left-side navigation pane of the details page, choose Applications > Knative.
  5. On the Services tab, click Create Service in the upper-right corner.
  6. On the Create Service page, set the Namespace and Service Name parameters. Then, select an image and an image version.
    Parameter Description
    Namespace Select the namespace to which the Service belongs.
    Service Name Enter a name for the Service. In this example, helloworld-go is used.
    Image Name To select an image, click Select Image. In the dialog box that appears, select an image and click OK. You can also enter the address of a private image registry. The registry address must be in the domainname/namespace/imagename:tag format. In this example, registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/knative-sample/helloworld-go is used.
    Image Version Click Select Image Version and select an image version. By default, the latest version is used. In this example, 73fbdd56 is selected.
    Access Protocol
    HTTP and gRPC are supported.
    Note gRPC is developed based on the HTTP/2 standard and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) serialization protocol, and supports various programming languages. Compared with HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 allows you to send and receive packets more efficiently.
    Container Port

    The container port that you want to expose. The port number must be from 1 to 65535.

    For more information about the other parameters, see Create a Knative Service.

  7. Click Create.
    After the Service is created, you can find the Service on the Services tab.
  8. Run the following command to access the Service: 
    curl -H "<Default domain>" http://<Gateway address>
    • Default domain: In this example, "host: helloworld-go.default.example.com" is used.
    • Gateway address: In this example, "39.106.XX.XX" is used.

    Expected output:

    Hello World!

Step 2: Create a revision to deploy a canary release

  1. Log on to the ACK console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane of the ACK console, click Clusters.
  3. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that you want to manage and click the name of the cluster or click Details in the Actions column. The details page of the cluster appears.
  4. In the left-side navigation pane of the details page, choose Applications > Knative.
  5. Create a revision.
    1. On the Services tab, select the Service that you created and click Details in the Actions column.
    2. Click Create Revision.
    3. On the Basic Information wizard page, click Advanced and add the following environment variable setting: TARGET=Knative.
      11
    4. Click Next Step.
    5. On the Traffic Splitting Settings wizard page, set the Percent % parameter of the revision to 0. Then, click Create.
      Note The sum of traffic ratios of all revisions must be 100.
    6. After the revision is created, you can find details about the new version on the Services tab.
    7. Run the following command to access the Service:
      Note The Percent parameter is set to 0 for the new version. This means that all requests to access the helloworld-go Service are sent to the earlier version. 
      curl -H "host: helloworld-go.default.example.com" http://39.106.XX.XX

      Expected output:

      Hello World!
  6. Modify the traffic splitting ratio to deploy a canary release.
    1. On the Services tab, select the Service that you created and click Details in the Actions column.
    2. Click Split Traffic.
    3. In the Split Traffic dialog box, set the Percent parameter to 50% for both the earlier and new versions. Then, click OK.
    4. After you change the values of the Percent parameters, check the details about the old and new versions on the Services tab.
    5. Run the following command to access the Service:
      curl -H "host: helloworld-go.default.example.com" http://39.106.XX.XX

      Expected output:

      12

      The Percent parameter is set to 50% for both the earlier and new versions. This means that requests to access the helloworld-go Service are evenly distributed to the earlier and new version.

      You can change the value of the Percent parameter to implement canary releases. The new version is completely released if you set the Percent parameter to 100% for the new version. During the process, you can change the value of the Percent parameter to roll back if issues are found in the new version.