The Knative serverless project was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project in a move that CNCF executive director Priyanka Sharma said ushers serverless computing out of its "developer darling" phase and into a new era of maturity.

As a result of the project's CNCF acceptance, "the stage is now set [for Knative] to be enterprise ready," Sharma told SDxCentral. She expects to see more serverless workloads in production and vendors get more creative about bundling Knative into their product offerings.

The Knative project was launched in mid-2018 with a focus on providing an open source set of components that allow for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. Google was the initial founding vendor, and IBM, Red Hat, VMware, and SAP also contributed to Knative's development.

"Open sourcing this technology provided the industry with an open serverless platform to help drive innovation," Alexandra Bush, who leads Google Cloud's open source marketing, explained in a blog post. The cloud giant said it plans to continue supporting the project through its group of maintainers within the Knative community and by offering services compatible with the serverless project, Bush said.

Knative's partner ecosystem and its abundance of resources has paved a clear path for Knative, which Sharma said has already overcome many of its challenges. "The project is well-bolstered" in terms of vendor support and manpower. "Now it's just a matter of execution," and though that execution will take significant time and effort, "I am seeing people who are gung-ho and ready to do it."

Sharma said she isn't worried end users will be too wary to consider using the serverless project — they have grown in maturity just like the project has. "The end users we have today are totally different from the people I talked to 18 months ago and [are] completely different from the people I talked to three years ago," Sharma explained.

Part of the end users' maturation is the checklist of features many consider before deciding if a project is enterprise ready, and "CNCF happily is able to meet those checklists," Sharma said. Once Knative progresses through the CNCF and becomes a graduated project with the foundation's stamp of approval, "that will remove any concerns someone might have."

"This is a super welcome project at CNCF. Knative is all about cloud native, and now it has come home," Sharma said.