History
Origin
Knative began at Google in 2018 as a way to run serverless workloads on top of Kubernetes rather than a proprietary platform. IBM, Red Hat, VMware, and SAP joined early (CNCF graduation announcement; The New Stack). The knative/serving repository was created on 2018-01-24 (GitHub API).
The original project had three pillars: Build, Serving, and Eventing. Build later grew into Tekton and split off, leaving Serving and Eventing as the two cores (The New Stack).
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Started at Google; Serving repo created 2018-01-24 |
| 2021 | v1.0 released, declared production ready |
| 2022 | Accepted as a CNCF incubating project (2022-03-02) |
| 2025 | Graduated within the CNCF (graduated 2025-09-11, announced 2025-10-08) |
How it evolved
The scope narrowed over time. Build moved out to become Tekton, and the project settled on Serving (request-driven autoscaling) and Eventing (event delivery) as its two stable surfaces (The New Stack). The v1.0 release in 2021 signaled API stability and a production-ready posture (CNCF announcement).
CNCF incubation was accepted on 2022-03-02 (CNCF blog). Graduation followed roughly seven years after the project's start, with the TOC review tracked in cncf/toc #1868 and the graduation announced on 2025-10-08 (CNCF announcement).
Where it stands now
Knative is a CNCF Graduated project (CNCF project page). The stated direction at graduation centers on aligning the networking stack with the Kubernetes Gateway API, strengthening safe-by-default container settings, and moving metrics and tracing onto OpenTelemetry (CNCF announcement). This deep-dive reads the code at commit 6fb71ff, which sits 46 commits after tag knative-v1.22.0 on the knative/serving repository.