The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is home to many of the most important modern open source projects, including Kubernetes. Today, the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee announced that it has now also accepted Knative as a CNCF incubating project.
“Knative is a powerful technology that is well integrated with the cloud native ecosystem, making it easier to run serverless containers on Kubernetes,” said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk. “We think the project will benefit greatly from an 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.”
Knative (pronounced kay-nay-tiv) was created by Google in 2018, but since then, a number of other industry heavyweights including IBM, Red Hat, VMware, TriggerMesh and SAP also worked on it. The idea behind the project is to make it easier for its users to build, deploy and manage serverless and event-driven applications on top of Kubernetes. That’s very much where a lot of enterprises are currently going, too, when they develop new applications or modernize existing ones as part of their digital transformation projects. And despite Knative still being a very young project, Bloomberg, Alibaba Cloud, Bloomberg, IBM and VMware already use it in production, while Google uses Knative to power Google Cloud’s serverless computing platform.
The project hit its version 1.0 milestone last November and shortly after, Google announced that it had submitted the project to the CNCF for consideration. Now that this process is complete, Google will donate the Knative trademark, IP and code to the CNCF.
“Following the recent achievement of reaching stability with Knative 1.0, we believe that donating the project to a vendor-neutral home is the next step in enabling the project to grow and the community to govern itself,” said Carlos Santana, Knative Steering Committee and DOCS-UX Lead. “We believe that the CNCF is that vendor-neutral foundation and hope that Knative’s acceptance 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 of feedback and features.”