Introduction and release notes for Knative components - Container Service for Kubernetes

Knative is an open-source, Kubernetes-based serverless framework that delivers a cloud-native and cross-platform orchestration standard for serverless applications. Knative Serving is a fully managed and O&M-free core component of Knative responsible for handling serverless workloads, including application deployment and version management. When no traffic is processed, the number of pods is scaled to zero. This topic describes the release notes for Knative Serving.

Introduction

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Knative is fully compatible with open-source Knative and integrates comprehensively with Alibaba Cloud services. The capabilities of ACK Knative are enhanced to offer more extensive product solutions. For more information about Knative, see Overview.

Knative consists the following core components, which provide different features:

Knative Serving: provides serverless workload management capabilities. Knative Serving enables serverless deployment, version management, and canary releases for your applications. Knative Serving also supports pod auto scaling based on resource requests. If no traffic is processed, the number of pods is scaled to zero.
Knative Eventing: provides event management capabilities, which allow you to interface with external event sources, register and subscribe to events, and filter events. The event system decouples event producers and event consumers.
Knative Functions: allows you to create, build, and deploy Knative Services in an efficient manner. You can deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative Services to a Kubernetes cluster by using Knative Functions without the need to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology stack, such as Kubernetes, containers, and Knative.

Usage notes

For more information about how to use Knative, see Deploy Knative. For more information about how to manage Knative, see Manage Knative components and Upgrade Knative Serving.

Release notes

November 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.12.7-aliyun.6	2024-11-12	Knative is integrated with EventBridge. `StartupProbe` is supported.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

September 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.12.5-aliyun.7	2024-09-09	This version is compatible with Kourier 1.12. The image repositories are compatible with the Container Registry Enterprise Edition. Prometheus dashboard of preemptible Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances is available. You can specify the type of reserved instances as elastic container instances on virtual nodes of ACK clusters.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

June 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.12.4-aliyun.7	2024-06-18	Important The Kubernetes version of the cluster must be 1.26 or later. This version is compatible with open source Knative 1.12.4. ACK managed clusters allow you to manage Knative control plane components without consuming pod resources. Knative control plane components include `controller`, `autoscaler`, and `webhook`. Knative control plane components are automatically hosted when you install Knative in a cluster. Knative on Service Mesh (ASM) is optimized. The log output of the queue-proxy component is optimized.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

May 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.10.9-aliyun.7	2024-05-23	Both Internet-facing and internal-facing Application Load Balancer (ALB) instances are supported. The issue that routing rules are cleared when you delete a DomainMapping is fixed. The issue that reserved instances are created repeatedly is fixed. Knative applications can be scaled down to 0 in ACK Serverless cluster.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

December 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.10.6-aliyun.1	2023-12-25	Important The Kubernetes version of the cluster must be 1.26 or later. Existing ALB instances can be reused. The downward API is supported by Knative Services. The CVE-2023-48713 vulnerability is fixed.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

October 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.8.3-aliyun.1	2023-10-17	Knative domain mappings can be used to configure Microservices Engine (MSE) gateways to access Services over HTTPS. The issue that instances are reserved during a scale-in activity is fixed.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

July 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.8.2-aliyun.1	2023-07-20	Important The Kubernetes version of the cluster must be 1.24 or later. Pods are created based on the `autoscaling.knative.dev/activation-scale` setting to handle traffic spikes when Knative initializes. Knative 1.4.x can be updated to 1.8.2.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

June 2023

Version number

Release date

Description

Impact

v1.4.5-aliyun.1

2023-06-19

Pods can be scaled to zero by ACK Serverless Knative, which works based on MSE gateways.

KServe is supported.

No impact on workloads. We recommend that you perform the update during off-peak hours.

May 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.4.3-aliyun.1	2023-05-18	MSE gateways are supported. Precise scaling control based on request concurrency is supported.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

April 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.4.2-aliyun.1	2023-04-26	This version is compatible with Kubernetes 1.26. GPU metrics-based predictive scaling by using Advanced Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (AHPA) is supported. The Kourier gateway version issue is fixed.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you update Knative during off-peak hours.

March 2023

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.4.1-aliyun.1	2023-03-23	Reserved instances are supported. The podspec-fieldref parameter is enabled by default. Startup issues in Kafka sources are fixed.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you perform the update during off-peak hours.