CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Knative as a CNCF incubating project. Knative was originally created by Google in 2018 to simplify the deployment and management of serverless and event-driven applications on Kubernetes. Major contributors to the project include RedHat, IBM, VMware and SAP. The open source platform aims to help development teams manage, monitor, and operate Kubernetes without needing a lot of technical knowledge and time.

The project, which reached version 1.0 in November 2021, is currently at v1.2 with releases expected about every six weeks. Knative currently has two main components named Knative Serving and Knative Eventing, which can be used independently but are usually deployed together. Knative Serving runs serverless containers on Kubernetes, automating much of the work around networking, autoscaling, and revision tracking. Knative Eventing automates the deployment of event-driven architecture so developers can attach event-driven data streams to Knative apps.

The project has a comprehensive roadmap of new features for Serving and Eventing. Knative Functions, which is currently in pre-release, targets optimized developer productivity and ease of use for the Knative building blocks of Eventing and Serving. Knative Functions aims to bring an event-driven faas-like experience to Knative using CNCF Buildpacks to convert the user’s application code to a container.

Knative has stated that by becoming an incubating project it hopes it 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.

The Knative community currently consists of more than 1,800 individuals, with 94 contributors who are eligible to vote. CNCF has stated that the project’s governance structure includes 17 Working Group Leads working across 11 Working Groups, five Knative Steering Committee (KSC) members, five Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) members, and three Knative Trademark Committee (KTC) members.

By Emily Nicholls