The Knative Project is set to hit a significant 1.0 milestone this week with a focus on democratizing serverless computing and initiating wider adoption of the Kubernetes-based platform. The move comes more than 3 years after the product was initially unveiled and moves to reduce concerns over the project's future.

The 1.0 designation will be placed on all of the repositories covered in the project's current "release train." All of the project's core serving and eventing components will also be designated as general available (GA), with the extension components moved to either alpha, beta, or GA.

Naina Singh, principal product manager at Red Hat, explained that the 1.0 designation means that the Knative project is stable and and that end-users should now feel comfortable using the product in commercial environments. This is especially important for organizations limited to running software platforms that are at least at a 1.0 designation.

“We are confident in our project,” Singh said, adding that “in the back of some of the users' minds, the project is still not mature enough” without an official 1.0 designation. This perceived gap in Knative capabilities has likely hindered adoption of the platform, she added.

That sentiment was echoed by Graham Seiner, VP of product at VMware, who noted that the project feels "confident [that] the scale and the stability — like we should — really do the work to get this [version] to be declared 1.0."

Seiner's confidence is backed by VMware's current use of Knative as a core component of its Tanzu platform. Red Hat and Google, which are fellow founding members of the Knative project, have also been using the platform as part of their serverless efforts.

“We're now at a point where we think all the different components that we believe are important for serverless workloads on Kubernetes are there,” added Michael Maximilien, distinguished engineer at IBM, which is now owner of Red Hat. “They might not be perfect, but that's software, right? We're gonna keep improving it, but at least we can say this is version 1.0.”

According to Maximilien, setting up a strong community around an open source project like Knative is another key ingredient in creating “a recipe for success.” With Knative, “that community feeling and engagement was very, very strong from the beginning,” Maximilien said.

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. The platform is targeted at unchaining current serverless development platforms that are tied to their respective cloud parents. These would include hosted services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Knative is focused on orchestrating source-to-container builds; routing and managing traffic during deployment; auto-scaling workloads; and binding services to event ecosystems.

“Democratization is so important,” Singh said. “We want to keep democratizing serverless on Kubernetes.”

Singh added that the project is targeting the release of conformance testing aids that will provide further stability assurances around the platform. Any vendor can run Knative’s conformance tests and receive a badge, signifying that users have a portability guarantee to avoid being locked in to a single vendor, Singh explained.

The 1.0 launch also comes just over a year after Google pledged to give up significant control over the project by electing a steering committee. The current steering committee includes a member from Google, one from IBM, and two "independent" members.

Looking ahead, the project will mainly stick to a six-week update cycle following its 1.0 release. Aside from conformance tests, Knative 1.0 also includes proper documentation, more tutorials, and a polished website to show users the platform is ready to take into production, Singh explained.

Knative 1.0 is “going to be a really big milestone and checkmark for users, for contributors, and [for] developers,” Singh said. “From here on, I only see positive things and a lot more growth.”