The Knative team has released version 1.0 of the open source platform for deploying and operating serverless cloud-native applications using Kubernetes.

Although Knative is already widely deployed, becoming the most widely-installed serverless layer on Kubernetes, reaching Knative 1.0 is still hailed as an important milestone by the project team, which announced the release on the Knative blog.

As explained by the project team, Knative is composed of a number of components that are versioned together, but those components have different levels of maturity — ranging from experimental to already generally available. As it is desirable to keep the versions used in Knative in sync, the decision was made to move all components to version 1.0. General availability levels are marked for components individually.

This highlights the challenge the Knative team had in figuring out what the bar for 1.0 was, as many of its components have been production-ready for some time now. However, it is important for users to have a single number to help understand what they have installed and what works together. The Knative project infrastructure is also designed to manage a single version number, the team said.

As of November 2, all the repositories covered in the release train will have a 1.0 release. The core components (Serving, Eventing) will be generally available (GA), while extension components such as plugins will either be in Alpha, Beta, or GA state. The respective maturity level will be published on the README.md or documentation pages for each component.

The Knative project was started by Google in 2018, with the aim of systemising best practices in cloud-native application development. It pulls together an essential set of components necessary to build and run serverless applications on Kubernetes.

Knative allows developers to create a service by packaging code as a container image and deploying it using Knative. The code will only run when it needs to perform some process, with Knative starting and stopping instances automatically. Resources are not consumed unless the code is running.

Knative was developed in partnership with companies such as IBM, Red Hat, SAP, VMware and over 50 others. Google offers Cloud Run for Anthos as a managed Knative service and has stated it will be Knative 1.0 conformant.