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So it turns out Google would like to pass Knative to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after all
That means the 'forseeable future' at Mountain View is... about two years
What a difference two years makes. Knative has applied to become a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project.
Google had insisted in 2019 that it would not be donating the framework to any foundation "for the foreseeable future" but a few short years later it has kicked off the process to donate the IP, trademark, and code to CNCF.
CNCF was obviously cock-a-hoop about the whole thing, and Priyanka Sharma, the foundation's executive director, told The Register: "Knative is a powerful technology that is enmeshed in the cloud native ecosystem making it easy to run serverless containers on Kubernetes. We welcome the decision and look forward to the Knative community contribution as it goes through the CNCF project proposal process."
As well they might, although Istio does not appear to be part of the deal just yet, something that raised a few eyebrows among the community.
Genuine question: #Knative getting donated to #CNCF but #Istio is not. Why? Is that more about Knative or Istio?
— Tamal Saha (@tsaha) November 30, 2021
Still, Google's change of heart is being broadly welcomed, with the likes of IBM and former Microsoft VP and the company's representative on the CNCF board, Gabe Monroy, giving the move a hearty thumbs-up.
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Knative, which recently hit the v1 milestone, is a set of serverless APIs designed to make life easier for Kubernetes developers when it comes to deployment and scaling of serverless applications. It is also usually associated with the Istio service mesh. CNCF already has the Linkerd service mesh in its stable of graduated projects.
In its post, Google said it was "committed to the future of Knative, and offering Knative 1.0 conformant Cloud Run and Cloud Run For Anthos products." It went on to say that handing the tech over to CNCF "secures Knative's long-term future and encourages continuing and open innovation."
Knative opened a pull request to join the CNCF as an incubating project and said Google would be working with the foundation to ensure the process goes smoothly.
"Due diligence," it said, "usually takes the CNCF TOC [Technical Oversight Committee] two to three months." ®