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

Knative is an open source Kubernetes-based serverless framework. The purpose of Knative is to create a cloud-native and cross-platform orchestration standard for serverless applications. Knative helps you build an enterprise-class serverless container platform to deploy and manage modern serverless workloads. The Knative service provided by Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) is compatible with open source Knative, and can be integrated with ACK, Message Service (MNS), and the storage and network services of Alibaba Cloud. This allows you to use Knative to deploy and manage workloads in production environments.

Introduction

Knative consists of two core components. These components comprise a general-purpose serverless framework:

Knative Eventing: provides event management capabilities, such as producing and consuming events.
Knative Eventing provides an all-in-one system for event-driven serverless applications. The system provides features that allow you to install external event sources, register and subscribe to events, and filter events. The event system decouples event producers and event consumers. An event producer can generate events before active event consumers listen to events. An event consumer can listen to events before active producers produce events.
Knative Serving: provides serverless workload management capabilities. Knative Serving enables serverless deployment, version management, and canary releases for applications. Knative Serving also supports pod auto scaling based on resource requests. If no workload is processed, the number of pods is scaled to zero.
Knative Serving is used to manage the workloads of serverless applications that provide services to users. The most important feature of Knative Serving is pod auto scaling. Pods can be scaled without limits. Knative Serving also supports canary release.

Usage notes

For more information, see Knative overview.

Release notes

July 2023

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.8.2-aliyun.1	2023-07-20	Important The Knative version must be 1.24 or later. The `autoscaling.knative.dev/activation-scale` annotation can be used to create a specific number of pods during the initialization phase of a Knative Service. The pods are used to handle traffic spikes when the Knative Service is being initialized. Knative 1.4.x can be updated to 1.8.2.	No impact on workloads. We recommend that you perform the update during off-peak hours.

June 2023

Version

Release date

Description

Impact

v1.4.5-aliyun.1

2023-06-19

The number of pods in an ACK Serverless cluster can be scaled to zero by using Knative and Microservices Engine (MSE) gateways.

KServe is supported.

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

May 2023

Version	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 perform the update during off-peak hours.

April 2023

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.4.2-aliyun.1	2023-04-26	Kubernetes 1.26 is supported. 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 perform the update during off-peak hours.

March 2023

Version	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.