History
Origin
KEDA began in 2019 as a joint open source project from Microsoft and Red Hat, aimed at running serverless, event-driven containers on Kubernetes ([4]). The repository kedacore/keda was created on 2019-02-13. The motivation was concrete: the native HPA scales on CPU and memory and stops at one replica, which does not match queue- and event-driven workloads that should idle at zero and burst on demand.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2019 | Started as a Microsoft + Red Hat collaboration; repo created 2019-02-13 ([4]) |
| 2020 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2020-03-12 ([4]) |
| 2021 | Promoted to CNCF Incubating on 2021-08-18 ([4], [6]) |
| 2023 | Graduated in the CNCF on 2023-08-22 ([4], [6]) |
| 2026 | v2.20.1 released 2026-06-08 ([3]) |
How it evolved
The defining architectural shift came in the v2 line. KEDA split into a controller (operator) and a separate metrics adapter that serves the Kubernetes External Metrics API. The pinned commit still ships that two-component model plus an admission webhook: make build produces the manager, adapter, and webhooks binaries ([2], Makefile:211). The scaler catalogue grew alongside it; the build switch in buildScaler now has roughly 78 cases ([2], pkg/scaling/scalers_builder.go:123).
Governance matured in step with the CNCF milestones. By graduation the project reported 60+ scalers and 9 authentication providers, and described itself as vendor-neutral against cloud-specific autoscalers ([4]).
Where it stands now
KEDA is a CNCF Graduated project ([4], [5]). It releases on the v2 line with regular patch and minor releases; v2.20.1 shipped on 2026-06-08 ([3]). This deep-dive is pinned to main at c5b577c (2026-06-19), about 11 days ahead of v2.20.1, with no tag of its own ([2]). The adopter list and scaler documentation live on the keda.sh site rather than in the core repo ([1], README.md:66-68).