Tag Archives: Knative

ko applies to become a CNCF sandbox project

Back in 2018, the team at Google working on Knative needed a faster way to iterate on Kubernetes controllers. They created a new tool dedicated to deploying Go applications to Kubernetes without having to worry about container images. That tool has proven to be indispensable to the Knative community, so in March 2019, Google released it as a stand-alone open source project named ko.

Since then, ko has gained in popularity as a simple, fast, and secure container image builder for Go applications. More recently, the ko community has added, amongst many other features, multi-platform support and automatic SBOM generation. Today, like the original team at Google, many open source and enterprise development teams depend on ko to improve their developer productivity. The ko project is also increasingly used as a solution for a number of build use-cases, and is being integrated into a variety of third party CI/CD tools.

At Google, we believe that using open source comes with a responsibility to contribute, sustain, and improve the projects that make our ecosystem better. To support the next phase of community-driven innovation, enable net-new adoption patterns, and to further raise the bar in the container tool industry, we are excited to announce today that we have submitted ko as a sandbox project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

This step begins the process of transferring the ko trademark, IP, and code to CNCF. We are excited to see how the broader open source community will continue innovating with ko.

By Mark Chmarny – Google Open Source Programs Office

Knative applies to become a CNCF incubating project

Image of the Knative logo

In 2018, the Knative project was founded and released by Google, and was subsequently developed in close partnership with IBM, Red Hat, VMware, and SAP. The project provides a serverless experience layer on Kubernetes, providing the building blocks you need to build and deploy modern, container-based serverless applications. Over the last three years, Knative has become the most widely-installed serverless layer on Kubernetes. More recently, Knative 1.0 was released, reaching an important milestone that was made possible thanks to the contributions and collaboration of over 600 developers in the community.

Google has worked closely with key maintainers and partners on the evolution of Knative, including conformance definition and stability ahead of the 1.0 milestone. To enable the next phase of community-driven innovation in Knative, today we have submitted Knative to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for consideration as an incubating project, which begins the process to donate the Knative trademark, IP, and code.

As a leader in serverless computing, we’re committed to the future of Knative, and offering Knative 1.0 conformant Cloud Run and Cloud Run For Anthos products. Finding a home in the CNCF secures Knative’s long-term future and encourages continuing and open innovation. This donation recognizes the adoption and investment in Knative from the community, and will encourage further multi-vendor innovation, broader education and training.

At Google, we believe that using open source comes with a responsibility to contribute, sustain, and improve the projects that help drive innovation and make better software. We are excited to see how developers will continue to build and innovate in serverless using Knative.

By Alexandra Bush and Edd Wilder-James, Google Open Source

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 elects new Technical Oversight Committee members

Towards the end of 2019, Knative project initiated a series of changes to its governance to ensure sustainability in the long term. Over the last week, the project reached a new milestone by successfully wrapping up its first Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) elections, bringing more vendor diversity to the technical stewardship of Knative.

Google has grown thousands of open source projects throughout the years, and it is this collective knowledge that informed the changes proposed to Knative governance. Over the last six months, we worked together with the other members of the Knative Steering Committee, and with the project’s contributors to create a clear set of rules for technical leadership and governance, describing the many ways in which contributors could engage with the project. This process was key to developing trust with Knative’s community, the project’s most valued stakeholder. In the exercise of this vote, the community was able to test the new election process, which proved to be solid: it will be repeated annually for this project, and can serve as a model for other projects as well.

The TOC election, which had a turnout of 70% of active contributors to the project, yielded a new technical stewardship for Knative, with members representing RedHat, VMWare and Google, as follows:

Nghia Tran (Google) - new member
Markus Thömmes (Red Hat) - new member
Grant Rodgers (Google) - new member
Matt Moore (VMWare) - existing member
Evan Anderson (VMWare) - existing member

Members of Knative TOC not only have the technical stewardship of the project in their hands for the next two years, they also model the community’s values: they have strong technical skills, they contribute to the project, and they are collegial, mentoring other contributors and helping the project to grow in a sustainable and healthy way.

We celebrated this important milestone for Knative at the last community meetup. Watch the video to meet the new TOC members, and check out the contribution guidelines to join the project.

By María Cruz, Google Open Source

Introducing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the new home for Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker

We're excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we're excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We're also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

To learn more about the CDF, listen to this week's Kubernetes Podcast from Google, where the guest is Tracy Miranda, Director of Open Source Community from our partner CloudBees.

If you'd like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.

By Dan Lorenc and Kim Lewandowski, DevOps at Google Cloud

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