Knative

What Knative does

Knative is an open-source, Kubernetes-native serverless platform developed as a community project and governed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Originally created in 2018 by Google in partnership with IBM and other contributors, it was donated to the CNCF in 2019 and graduated to top-tier CNCF project status in 2021. The project provides middleware primitives—built as Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions—so that platform and application teams can deploy, run, and scale cloud-native workloads without managing infrastructure directly.

Name

Knative

Legal name

The Knative Authors

Website

https://knative.dev

Company type

Private

Founded year

2018

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Knative is a CNCF-graduated open-source project that delivers Kubernetes-native building blocks—Serving, Eventing, and Functions—for deploying, autoscaling, and event-driving serverless workloads. It serves cloud-native development teams and enterprises running Kubernetes, with no commercial revenue model.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Serverless Platform / Cloud-Native Infrastructure

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132), Computer Systems Design Services (541512)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)

akta.pro primary industry

Enterprise PaaS (App Runtime & Managed Application Platforms) (HDAEAKAB)

akta.pro secondary industries

Cloud-Native Application Development (Containers/Kubernetes/Serverless) (BPAEAFAE), Kubernetes & Container Platform Management (Private Cloud) (HDABABAC), Cloud-Native Enablement (Containers, Kubernetes, Service Mesh) (BPAEAKAE), Developer Experience Platforms for Enterprise (IDEs, CI/CD, Dev Portals) (HDAEAKAI)

Keywords

• Serverless platform
• Kubernetes runtime
• Event-driven architecture
• Container autoscaling
• Cloud-native functions

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels3 records

Core offering

Knative is an open-source, CNCF Graduated project that provides Kubernetes-native middleware primitives for building, deploying, and managing serverless applications. Its core offerings are Knative Serving (deploy and autoscale serverless containers including scale-to-zero), Knative Eventing (event-driven architecture with pluggable messaging backends), and Knative Functions (templates and a `func` CLI for building stateless functions), distributed free under the Apache 2.0 license.

Product overview

Knative is a cloud-native serverless platform that provides the building blocks for creating modern, cloud-based applications on Kubernetes. It is a CNCF graduated project comprising three main components: Knative Serving for deploying and autoscaling serverless workloads, Knative Eventing for event-driven architectures with routing and handling of asynchronous events, and Knative Functions for simplified serverless function development. Serving and Eventing are installed into Kubernetes clusters, while Functions uses a CLI tool (func) to build and deploy stateless functions as containers. The platform supports pluggable networking ingress routes and pluggable message transports, allowing integration with various infrastructure components. The Knative Operator enables GitOps-based installation and management of Knative components via Kubernetes Custom Resources.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• Knative Serving: The serving component of Knative that handles the deployment and scaling of serverless workloads.
• Knative Eventing
• Knative Functions

Products and services

• Knative Serving Kubernetes-native component that deploys and manages serverless workloads with automatic scaling (including scale-to-zero), routing and network programming, and point-in-time snapshots of deployed code and configurations. Designed for cloud-native development teams running containerized applications on Kubernetes.
• Knative Eventing Kubernetes-native component that enables event-driven architectures with support for multiple event sources, brokers, triggers, channels, and sinks for routing and handling asynchronous events. Supports pluggable messaging transports including Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, AWS SQS, Redis Streams, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
• Knative Functions Provides application template patterns that developers can version and update for building serverless functions. The `func` client CLI builds and deploys stateless functions as standard containers without requiring cluster installation, supporting multiple language runtimes.
• Knative Operator

Quantifiable outcome

• IBM watsonx Assistant reduced ML training time from 3.5 minutes to 90 seconds using Knative Eventing
• +1 more outcomes

Named customers3 records

Segments2 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration16 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

Nine partnerships are on record, tiered core.

• IstiocoreTechnology or IntegrationService mesh integration providing traffic management, security, and observability for Knative services. Knative supports installing Istio for networking layer configuration, including ingress gateway setup and authorization policies.
• Apache KafkacoreTechnology or IntegrationKnative supports Kafka as a messaging broker for eventing. Includes Kafka Broker, Kafka Channel, and Kafka Source implementations for high-throughput, in-order event streaming.
• RabbitMQcoreTechnology or IntegrationKnative supports RabbitMQ as a messaging broker with RabbitMQ Broker and RabbitMQ Source implementations for moderate throughput and complexity messaging patterns.
• ContourcoreTechnology or IntegrationGeneral-purpose ingress controller with goal of enabling multi-team delegation, supported as an alternative networking layer for Knative.
• KServecoreTechnology or IntegrationKubernetes-native model serving platform built on Knative Serving, designed for production LLM deployments. Provides inference capabilities leveraging Knative's serverless infrastructure.
• cert-managercoreTechnology or IntegrationIntegration for requesting TLS certificates to enable HTTPS connections for Knative services, supporting external domain TLS and cluster-local domain encryption.
• PrometheuscoreTechnology or IntegrationMetrics collection integration for monitoring Knative Serving and Eventing workloads, commonly used alongside Knative for observability.
• Kubernetes Gateway APIcoreTechnology or IntegrationKnative supports the Kubernetes Gateway API (beta) as an alternative networking layer for ingress configuration.
• OpenTelemetrycoreTechnology or IntegrationKnative Eventing is instrumented with OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing, supporting multiple tracing backends including Jaeger V2.

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Broad incumbents

• Google Cloud Run: Managed serverless platform built on Knative that abstracts Kubernetes operations. Comparable as the most prominent commercial hyperscaler productization of Knative's runtime model.
• Azure Functions: Microsoft's managed serverless compute service with event-driven triggers and integrations. Comparable as a broad incumbent competing for the same enterprise serverless workload use cases.
• AWS Lambda: Hyperscaler-managed Functions-as-a-Service platform, the dominant commercial serverless offering. Comparable as the primary managed alternative that Knative customers may choose instead of self-hosting.
• Red Hat OpenShift Serverless: Enterprise distribution built on Knative for running serverless workloads on OpenShift. Comparable as a corporate sponsor that productizes Knative for enterprise Kubernetes users.

Direct peers

• OpenFaaS: Open-source Functions-as-a-Service framework for Kubernetes providing containerized serverless functions with autoscaling. Directly comparable to Knative Functions in target users and deployment model on Kubernetes.
• Fission: Kubernetes-native serverless functions framework with focus on developer experience and event-driven triggers. Direct peer in the Kubernetes serverless category, addressing similar use cases with a smaller install base.
• Nuclio: Serverless platform for AI/ML and event-driven workloads with Kubernetes support. Direct peer offering function execution and event handling, similar in scope to Knative's Serving and Eventing.
• Apache OpenWhisk: Apache Foundation serverless platform supporting event-driven functions with multiple language runtimes. Directly comparable to Knative as an open-source serverless runtime, though originally not Kubernetes-native.

Emerging players

• KEDA: CNCF-incubating Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaler that complements Knative by scaling workloads based on external metrics. Closely related and often deployed alongside Knative as an adjacent scaling primitive.
• TriggerMesh: Event-driven serverless platform providing cloud event integration across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Comparable in event-driven focus and target enterprise integration use cases, though a smaller commercial vendor.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/knative/docs
• Xx.com/KnativeProject

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Knative