CloudEvents, a specification for describing event data developed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Serverless working group, was voted into the CNCF’s incubator.

The project was announced at CloudNativeCon EU 2018 as a “standard event envelope” to “provide a consistent set of metadata which you can include with event data to make events easier to work with”. At that stage, stakeholders like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and Huawei had been actively working on the spec since January. 

Since then, the specification has been adopted by a number of projects, including Microsoft’s EventGrid, Adobe I/O Events, Oracle Fn, Serverless.com Event Gateway, and Knative. End-users using use CloudEvents apparently include Pandora and the German Ministry of Migration and Refugees.

Even though the due diligence report for CloudEvents highlighted some room for improvements when it comes to making adoption visible and the conformance testing repo, seven out of nine members of the technical oversight committee gave a +1 binding vote to welcome the project into the CNCF incubator.

The CNCF incubator is mainly a help to align projects with the foundation’s policies and goals. The foundation in turn helps with giving projects better visibility and promotes them as a part of its cloud native ecosystem, driving adoption along the way. 

The CNCF has three project stages, namely sandbox, incubator, and graduation. Normally, projects have to achieve best practice badges, go through security audits, adopt the CNCF code of conduct, define a project governance and committer process and demonstrate they have a variety of committers and adopters before graduating. However, since CloudEvents is a specification rather than a software project, and doesn’t have committers or maintainers in a classical sense, it falls to the TOC to say if the project can be moved to the next stage.

The news was followed by the result of the vote to move the release of CloudEvents 1.0 forward. In the absence of showstopping issues or concerns, voters Google, IBM, Microsoft, NATS, PayPal, RedHat, SAP, VMware, Vlad Ionescu, Erik Erikson, and John Mitchell unanimously approved declaring version 1.0 finished. 

The final result can be examined in the spec’s GitHub repository. Since version 0.3 which was released in June 2019, the working group clarified the specification’s wording further, and addressed issues such as persistence, error handling, batching, and adapters. Apart from that it might be worth noting that maps in attributes have been removed for more simplicity and extensions aren’t allowed to be nested anymore. A complete list of changes can be found in the release notes.

Moving forward, the CloudEvents team is planning to look into security and authentication related aspects of events, amongst other things. The Serverless working group is meanwhile thinking about focussing on workflows and investigating event subscriptions more thoroughly. Anyone interested in the future of the group can take part in the weekly group calls, which happen every Thursday at 9am PT.