CNCF Accepts Knative Middleware for Serverless Frameworks

The technical oversight committee (TOC) for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today voted to accept Knative middleware as an incubating project for integrating Kubernetes clusters with serverless computing frameworks.

Knative was originally developed by Google to ensure organizations did not get locked into a specific serverless computing framework deployed either in the cloud or in an on-premises IT environment. There are now more than 1,800 different individuals participating in the community including IBM, Red Hat, VMware and SAP.

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Overall, there are 17 working group leads for 11 working groups that include five Knative steering committee (KSC) members, five TOC members and three Knative trademark committee (KTC) members.

Originally created in 2018, Knative reached a 1.0 milestone last November. It is now being updated approximately every six weeks. Organizations that have deployed Knative in a production environment include Bloomberg and Alibaba Cloud.

Knative has two main components that come in the form of a Knative Serving capability that enables serverless containers on Kubernetes and Knative Eventing, which handles networking, autoscaling and revision tracking. Knative Eventing allows for universal subscription, delivery and management of events based on CloudEvents. Teams can declaratively build modern apps by attaching compute to a data stream using an object model. There are also plug-ins and extensions that provide access to a command line interface (CLI) and installation operator.

April Kyle Nassi, open source strategist and program manager for Google, says that as serverless computing frameworks become more widely employed, it’s clear organizations are starting to have a greater appreciation for middleware that prevents them from becoming locked into any particular platform.

Today, the most widely employed serverless computing platform is found on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Dubbed AWS Lambda, that framework is based on a proprietary architecture that can only be deployed in an AWS environment. As more organizations embrace multiple clouds, however, the expectation is that usage of serverless computing frameworks will increase.

In general, a serverless computing framework enables developers to employ programming tools, known as functions, to invoke IT infrastructure resources on demand. A developer, for example, might use a function to invoke the resources required to intermittently run an analytics module when required. Previously, a developer would need to be aware of just how much IT infrastructure resources they might require.

It’s not likely serverless computing frameworks will become the dominant IT platform for building and deploying applications. Functions are relatively small pieces of code designed to augment longer-running applications built using another programming tool. However, as IT continues to evolve, it’s clear IT infrastructure resources will need to be invoked easily on demand. That approach may have a profound impact on how applications are constructed because many tasks that are only occasionally required could be completed by using a function to invoke a serverless computing framework.

Regardless of which serverless computing framework is invoked, however, the size and scope of the applications that can be constructed is increasing to the point where applications that were once next to impossible to cost-effectively build and run are now within reach.