Graduation marks Knative’s readiness for widespread production use, with upcoming features aimed at bridging legacy systems and expanding AI and cloud native integrations

Key Highlights:

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – October 8, 2025 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Knative, a serverless, event-driven application layer on top of Kubernetes.

Knative simplifies how developers build, deploy, and run modern workloads by abstracting the infrastructure concerns such as autoscaling, routing, event delivery, and building containers. It allows teams to focus on architecture and business logic and get started quickly on Kubernetes without needing to ramp up on dozens of Kubernetes concepts and resources. As the C-suite looks to optimize costs and simplify operations, Knative can do so with features like autoscaling to zero to minimize infrastructure waste.

“Knative fills several gaps in the cloud native ecosystem as an easy on-ramp to Kubernetes, with Knative’s eventing acting as the missing skeleton for connecting events to reactions,” said Evan Anderson, Knative co-founder. “It’s gratifying to see the vision that inspired Knative realized and adopted across the CNCF.” 

Knative was created in 2018 at Google, with early contributions from partners such as IBM, Red Hat, VMware, and SAP. In 2021, Knative released version 1.0, signaling production readiness, and joined CNCF in 2022 as an incubating project. 

Within CNCF’s neutral ecosystem, Knative has attracted hundreds of contributors and many vendors. The project relies on and contributes to the CloudEvents specification for interoperable events, integrates with Buildpacks in the Knative Functions component, and shares base packages with Tekton, a project that originated from Knative’s early build system. Maintainers also contribute features to the Gateway API in order to support Knative workloads. As a Kubernetes-native project, it also complements other cloud native technologies such as observability, networking, and security.

The project roadmap includes Knative Eventing adding a new RequestReply resource, bridging synchronous and asynchronous workloads. This enables more clients, such as MCP clients or legacy applications, to communicate with applications built around an Event Broker. Additionally, Eventing now integrates with Apache Camel Kamelets—bringing new event sources into the ecosystem. For Serving, Knative is adopting the Gateway API to simplify the networking stack and is introducing safer container settings as a default to increase security posture. The project has also switched to OpenTelemetry for metrics and tracing, allowing end-users to emit metrics and traces to their preferred observability provider.

“Knative’s graduation reflects the maturity of serverless technology in the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “The project has built a strong contributor base, gained trust from end users and continues to evolve with integrations that address needs, from newer AI workloads to interoperability. We’re proud to support Knative’s growth and excited to see how the community continues to push the boundaries of cloud native and serverless.” 

To officially graduate, the project normalized governance documentation, merged earlier distinct committees (Trademark, Steering, and Technical Oversight) into a single Steering Committee by Dec 2024, and defined annual elections and the maintainer lifecycle, documented contribution processes (issues, PRs, and working groups). Further, Knative completed audits and reviews to ensure standards such as a General Technical Review with TAG Runtime & App Delivery, an OSTIF audit with Ada Logics, and a self-assessment completed with TAG Security.

Supporting quotes:

“I am proud to see new organizations adopt Knative and existing users expand their footprint; that growth in production use has been incredibly rewarding as a maintainer. Looking ahead, I am eager to see how emerging AI workloads will influence and advance the project. Lots of AI startups are using Knative as a basis of their offerings. Joining the CNCF was a key milestone in the project’s development, engaging new contributors and helping ensure the project’s longevity. CNCF graduation is a testament to the hard work of the project maintainers and the value of the CNCF—its neutral governance and strong community have made consistent end-user adoption possible.” – Dave Protasowski, Knative Steering Committee Member and Serving Lead

“Graduating within CNCF is an important milestone. It shows the maturity of not only our code base, but also the governance and the end user trust. I am proud of Knative Eventing’s incredible plug-and-play declarative EDA capabilities. I am also proud of Knative Serving’s reputation in the cloud native world. Looking ahead, I am excited about expanding Knative’s integrations across the cloud native ecosystem, and show AI communities that they can benefit a lot from Knative.” – Ali Ok, Knative maintainer and Steering committee member

Project End Users

“Knative is instrumental in the success of our Serverless Functions and Containers offerings at Scaleway, providing the robust and efficient foundation we need to serve a rapidly growing number of customers. Its powerful features and seamless scalability empower our users to deploy a wide range of applications with ease. By abstracting away the complexity of autoscaling from zero and pods management, Knative allows us to deliver a truly serverless experience that is both cost-effective and highly performant.” – Thomas Tacquet, Product Manager Serverless Compute at Scaleway

“Alibaba Cloud provides users with the ability to deploy serverless containers using Knative. These users rely on key capabilities such as autoscaling (including scaling to zero), routing, traffic splitting, easy rollouts, and rollbacks. We help users in multiple industries run Knative in production environments that include AI, medical, automobile, and finance, etc. We also help users accelerate iterations of AI inference models using Knative, and solve Pod cold start problems through reserved instance solutions.” – Li Peng (Yuan Yi), Technical Expert of Alibaba Cloud

“At Y Meadows, we run hundreds of Knative services in our Kubernetes clusters to power our AI process automation platform. Our clients depend on us to automate critical workflows such as processing incoming purchase orders and responding to customer service tickets. Knative’s autoscaling ensures we can scale up quickly to meet demand and scale down to zero to conserve resources. The Knative community has done outstanding work to ensure the project’s quality and security, and we congratulate them on reaching this important milestone.” – Adam Rich, VP and co-founder of Y Meadows

“Gojek is the largest technology company in Indonesia, offering ride-hailing, e-commerce, and delivery services to millions of users across Indonesia and Singapore. We decided to build a scalable self-serve ML platform that would cater to data scientists’ needs and offer them easy-to-use interfaces. We have used Knative since 2020, first as a dependency of KServe and later as an independent component of our DS Platform. Knative has been used in production since very early in our adoption, and at a very large scale. Serving millions of our users with over 100,000 RPS during peak times.” – Roman Wozniak, Head of Engineering, Gojek

Learn more about Knative and join the community: https://knative.dev/ 

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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