The Knative Project has applied to be an incubating project with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), marking a significant maturation step for the open source project. The move also marks the turning of a new leaf for Knative founder Google after its rocky history with the final destination of its open source Istio service mesh project.

If approved as an incubating project, the Kubernetes-based serverless project could find itself on a path to wider industry adoption. 

"Knative is a powerful technology that is enmeshed in the cloud-native ecosystem making it easy to run serverless containers on Kubernetes,” CNCF GM Priyanka Sharma said. “We welcome the decision and look forward to the Knative community contribution as it goes through the CNCF project proposal process.”

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 include hosted services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Google’s donation of Knative to the CNCF rides on the heels of the project’s 1.0 release last month that aimed to democratize serverless computing and initiate wider adoption of the Kubernetes-based platform.

The donation also marks a turn for Google's recent project management.

The everything giant developed Knative alongside Pivotal, IBM, Red Hat, and SAP, but has maintained ultimate control over the project. It pledged to give up significant control over the project last year by electing a steering committee. The current steering committee includes one member each from Google, IBM, Red Hat, Chainguard, and one “independent” member.

But many felt that the ultimate success of Knative required the project to be housed within a vendor-neutral organization like CNCF. This was the model Google followed with Kubernetes, which it donated into CNCF as that organization's first hosted project.

“Following the release of Knative 1.0, we believe that Knative is ready for the next step in its project journey, and we felt it would be best served by the resources and stewardship model of the CNCF,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email to SDxCentral. “This milestone is the completion of a major cycle of work, and represents the ideal time to donate and open up the project for further community-driven innovation.”

However, Google has taken a different route with Istio. The cloud giant decided to dock the Istio service mesh project within the newly formed Open Usage Commons (OUC) group rather than donate the project to the CNCF, as the open source community expected. That move garnered jeers across the industry and from some of Istio's fellow developers, and the project has since somewhat stalled as vendors and organizations have worked through the licensing impact of Google’s decision.