Announcing Knative 1.0!

Today, the Knative project released version 1.0, reaching an important milestone that was possible thanks to the contributions and collaboration of over 600 developers. Over the last three years, Knative became the most widely-installed serverless layer on Kubernetes.

The Knative project was released by Google in July 2018, with the vision to systemize best practices in cloud native application development, with a focus on three areas: building containers, serving and scaling workloads, and eventing. It delivers an essential set of components to build and run serverless applications on Kubernetes, allowing webhooks and services to scale automatically, even down to zero. Open-sourcing this technology provided the industry with essential base primitives that are shared by all. Knative was developed in close collaboration with IBM, Red Hat, SAP, VMWare, and over 50 different companies. Google offers Cloud Run for Anthos for managed Knative serving that will be Knative 1.0 conformant.

The road to 1.0

Autoscaling (including scaling to zero), revision tracking, and abstractions for developers were some of the early goals of Knative. In addition to delivering on those goals, the project also incorporated support for multiple HTTP routing layers, support for multiple storage layers for Eventing concepts with common Subscription methods, and designed a “Duck types” abstraction to allow processing arbitrary Kubernetes resources that have common fields, to name a few changes.

Knative is now available at 1.0, and while the API is closed for changes, its definition is publicly available so anyone can demonstrate Knative conformance. This stable API allows customers and vendors to support portability of applications, and establishes a new cloud native developer architecture.

Get started with Knative 1.0

Install Knative 1.0 using the documentation on the website. Learn more about the 1.0 release on the Knative blog, and at the Knative community meetup on November 17, 2021, where you'll hear about the latest changes coming with Knative 1.0 from maintainer Ville Aikas. Join the Knative Slack space to ask questions and troubleshoot issues as you get acquainted with the project.

By María Cruz, Program Manager – Google Open Source

Knative momentum continues, hits another adoption milestone

Released just four months ago by Google Cloud in collaboration with several vendors, Knative, an open source platform based on Kubernetes which provides the building blocks for serverless workloads, has already gained broad support.

The number of contributors has doubled, more than a dozen companies have contributed each month, and community contributions have increased over 45% since the 0.1 release. It’s an encouraging signal that validates the need for such a project, and suggests that ongoing development will be driven by healthy discussions among users and contributors.

Knative 0.2 Release 

In recent 0.2 release, the first major release since the project’s launch in July, we incorporated 323 pull requests from eight different companies. Knative 0.2 added a new Eventing resource model to complement the Serving and Build components. There were also lots of improvements under-the-hood, such as the implementation of pluggable routing and better support for autoscaling.

KubeCon North America

Continuing the theme, there are 10 sessions about Knative by speakers from seven different companies this week at KubeCon in Seattle. The sessions cover a variety of topics spanning from introductory overview sessions to advanced autoscaler customization. The number of companies represented by speakers illustrates the breadth of the growing Knative community.

Growing Ecosystem 

Another sign of Knative’s momentum is the growing ecosystem. A number of enterprise platform developers have begun using Knative to create serverless solutions on Kubernetes for their own hybrid cloud use-cases. Their use of the Knative API makes for a consistent developer experience and enables workload portability. For example, Pivotal, a top contributor to the Knative project, has adopted Knative alongside Kubernetes which helps them dedicate more resources higher in the stack:

"Since the release of Knative, we've been collaborating on an open functions platform to help companies run their new workloads on every cloud. That’s why we’re excited to launch the alpha of Pivotal Function Service." – Onsi Fakhouri, SVP of Engineering at Pivotal

Similarly, TriggerMesh has launched a hosted serverless management platform that runs on top of Knative, enabling developers to deploy and manage their functions from a central console.

"Knative provides us with the critical building blocks we need to create our serverless management platform." – Sebastien Goasguen, Co-founder, TriggerMesh

We’re excited by the speed with which Knative is being adopted and the broad cross section of the industry that is already contributing to the project. If you haven’t already jumped in, we invite you to get involved! Come visit github.com/knative and join the growing Knative community.

By Mark Chmarny, Knative Team