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Knative Is CNCF Incubating Project
March 3, 2022
 The
CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Knative as
a CNCF incubating project.
Knative is an open source, Kubernetes-based platform for building,
deploying, and managing serverless and event-driven applications. It
helps development teams manage, monitor, and operate Kubernetes in a way
that requires less technical knowledge and time.
Knative was founded in 2018 by Google and subsequently developed in
close partnership with IBM, Red Hat, VMWare, and SAP. The project has
since grown thanks to the collaboration and contributions of more than
1,800 different individuals in the community.
The project reached version 1.0 in November 2021, meaning all its
repositories are designated by the community to be stable and suitable
for commercial use. It is currently at v1.2, with periodic releases
happening every six weeks.
Knative already has many end users and is deployed as part of product
offerings from multiple companies. Production users include Alibaba
Cloud, Bloomberg, IBM, VMware, and more.
“Knative gives us a foundation of consistency,” said Andrew Webber,
Senior Software Engineer, deepc. “It should be possible for somebody
with an algorithm to have it on the [deepc] platform in an hour.”
“The community support is really great,” said Tilen Kavčič, Software
Engineer, Outfit7. “The hands-on experience with Knative was so
impressive. On the Slack channel, we got actual engineers to answer our
questions.”
“I’m a strong believer in working with open source projects,” said Noah
Fontes, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Puppet. “We’ve made
contributions to numerous projects, including Tekton, Knative,
Ambassador, and gVisor, all of which we depend on to make our product
functional.”
Knative governance has three central components that oversee the
project direction. These include:
17 Working Group Leads for 11 Working Groups
5 Knative Steering Committee (KSC) members, 5 Technical Oversight
Committee (TOC) members, and 3 Knative Trademark Committee (KTC) members
94 contributors eligible to vote in the last SC election – meaning
they have had at least 50 GitHub interactions with Knative projects
“Following the recent achievement of reaching stability with Knative
1.0, we believe that joining CNCF is the next step in enabling the
project to grow,” said Carlos Santana, Knative Steering Committee and
DOCS-UX Lead. “Becoming an incubating project will encourage additional
companies to adopt, contribute to, and evangelize the project. It will
also bring the Knative community closer to other cloud native projects
in the ecosystem – including all the projects it builds on – helping to
establish a virtuous cycle for feedback and features.”
“I’m proud to see end-users adopt Knative for production workloads and
vendors bundling it into their products. Knative offers so much value to
so many organizations,” said Dave Protasowski, Knative TOC and Serving
Lead. “Having the project and trademarks finally be in an open
foundation like CNCF gives everyone assurances of its independent
future. I’m looking forward to seeing new contributors and further
adoption by end-users.”
“Given its close alignment with the Kubernetes project and greater cloud
native ecosystem, we’re excited to accept Knative as a CNCF Incubating
project,” said Davanum Srinivas, CNCF TOC member and project sponsor.
“The Knative community is already thriving, and bringing the communities
together will help to foster innovation and collaboration that can help
the project achieve its goal of making serverless workloads accessible
to all.”
Main Components:
Knative has two main components named Knative Serving and Knative
Eventing. While they manage different tasks and outcomes and can operate
independently, together, they help make Knative a powerful tool for dev
teams and IT professionals.
Knative Serving runs serverless containers on Kubernetes with ease.
Knative takes care of the details of networking, autoscaling (even to
zero), and revision tracking, letting developers focus on your core
business logic.
Knative Eventing allows for universal subscription, delivery, and
management of events based on CloudEvents. Teams can build modern apps
by attaching compute to a data stream with declarative event
connectivity and a developer-friendly object model.
A robust ecosystem of plugins and extensions exists in the knative-sandbox,
including a CLI and Installation Operator.
Notable Milestones:
11k+ GitHub Stars
79 Releases
500-1,200 pull requests per month
150-400 issues per month
1.8k+ contributors
4k+ Slack Members
“Knative is a powerful technology that is well integrated with a
variety of other CNCF projects and the cloud native ecosystem, making it
easier to run serverless containers on Kubernetes,” said Chris Aniszczyk,
CTO of CNCF. “We think the project will benefit greatly from cultivating
its community under CNCF and moving to a fully open governance model
under the foundation, allowing it to grow even more by reaching new
contributors and end users. We look forward to working with the Knative
community and welcome the team’s contribution.”
 The
project has a comprehensive roadmap of new features for both Serving and
Eventing. A key feature of Knative is its focus on developer
productivity. Knative Functions, currently in pre-release, targets
optimized developer productivity and ease of use for the Knative
building blocks of Eventing and Serving, bringing an event-driven faas-like
experience to Knative. Functions leverage CNCF Buildpacks to convert the
user’s application code to a container.
As a CNCF-hosted project, Knative is part of a neutral foundation
aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux
Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community
outreach. Knative joins incubating technologies Argo, Buildpacks, Chaos
Mesh, CIlium, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, Dapr,
Dragonfly, emissary-ingress, Falco, Flagger, Flux, gRPC, KEDA, KubeEdge,
Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator
Framework, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos. |
