Specification for events has reached maturity, creating an industry-wide collaboration for open source serverless technologies

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – October 28, 2019 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that the open source specification CloudEvents has reached a version 1.0 milestone and has been promoted by the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) from the Sandbox to Incubation.

CloudEvents, a specification (spec) for describing event data in a common way, eases event declaration and delivery across services, platforms, and beyond. In reaching v1.0 and moving to Incubation, the spec defines the common attributes of an event that facilitate interoperability, as well as how those attributes are transported from producer to consumer via some popular protocols. It also creates a stable foundation on top of which the community can build better tools for developing, running, and operating serverless and event-driven architectures.

“Historically, the industry has lacked a standard for describing serverless-focused event metadata, meaning developers would need to re-learn how to consume the numerous types of event data across systems, making it difficult to build portable tooling,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “CloudEvents has defined a consistent set of metadata and for the first time in the industry, brought together the serverless community across cloud providers, enterprise software giants, and startups to implement and support the spec as part of its v1.0 milestone.”

The CloudEvents effort was organized by CNCF’s Serverless Working Group, which was created in April 2017 to explore the intersection of cloud native and serverless technology. An increasing number of industry stakeholders have been actively contributing to the project, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Red Hat, VMware, and more, cementing CNCF as the home of serverless collaboration for the leading technology companies around the world.

“The CloudEvents project has been such a success due to the lack of political games among the working group and the greater CNCF community,” said Doug Davis, senior technical staff member, IBM and co-chair of CNCF’s Serverless WG and the CloudEvents project. “Everyone understands what is at stake, so the focus has remained on what’s good for the community rather than any specific vendor. We’re incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work we’ve done with CloudEvents, and look forward to continuing to advance the use of serverless technologies.”

CloudEvents v1.0 has already been implemented in Knative’s Eventing framework, Red Hat’s EventFlow, Eclipse Vert.x and Debezium, SAP’s Kyma, and Serveless.com’s Event Gateway, among many others. Soon after the spec was created, Microsoft announced their support for CloudEvents natively for all events in Azure, via Azure Event Grid.

“The exciting outcome of having broad support for this open, standard, and consistent glue is the opportunity for uniform tooling, standard ways to de-serialize events and universal methods for routing and handling events,” said Corey Sanders, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure. “In the fast-changing serverless world, this interoperability is incredibly important for agile portability of your applications.”

CloudEvents was originally accepted into CNCF as a Sandbox project in May 2018. As a CNCF-hosted project, CloudEvents joins the other incubating projects OpenTracing, gRPC, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS, Linkerd, Helm, Rook, Harbor, etcd, Open Policy Agent, CRI-O, and TiKV. Like them, CloudEvents benefits from being part of CNCF, a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests that provides governance assistance, marketing support, and community outreach. CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation.

Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated project. For more information on what qualifies a technology for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria v.1.2.

To learn more, be sure to attend the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA in San Diego November 18-21, and the co-located Serverless Practitioners Summit on November 18, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Amsterdam March 30 – April 2, 2020.

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About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 450 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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