The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced the graduation of CloudEvents, a project designed to standardize event metadata for improved interoperability across various services, platforms, and systems.
This specification enables systems to understand the purpose of events and route them appropriately without needing deep, event-specific insight.
Initiated by the CNCF Serverless Working Group in May 2018, CloudEvents was aimed at enhancing serverless platform interoperability and user experience. It joined the CNCF Incubator in late 2019, coinciding with its V1 milestone.
“CloudEvents started with a simple premise of trying to spec out what a common set of event metadata would look like across a variety of cloud-native and serverless systems,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, of Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We are thrilled to see the project graduate and be used by a variety of products and projects across the globe, including CNCF projects like Falco, Keptn, Knative, wasmcloud, and more.”
CloudEvents has had over 340 contributors from 122 organizations contributing to its development. Its growing adoption is evident in its integration into various platforms and services, such as Adobe I/O Events, Alibaba Cloud EventBridge, Azure Event Grid, and Google Cloud Eventarc. This widespread use underscores its effectiveness in providing a standardized approach to event handling in cloud-native environments, according to the CNCF.
CloudEvents has influenced further innovation and projects within the CNCF ecosystem for CNCF projects like Argo, Falco, Harbor, Knative, and Serverless Workflow. To support the diverse development environment, CloudEvents has SDKs available in nine different programming languages, to enable the creation and management of CloudEvent-compatible events. This versatility has made it a key player in both open-source communities and enterprise environments.
Beyond CloudEvents, the CNCF’s Serverless Working Group, responsible for CloudEvents, continues to address challenges in serverless technology. The Serverless Workflow project, now a CNCF incubator project, originated from CloudEvents. Additionally, the CloudEvents team initiated xRegistry to develop standardized APIs for registries, promoting common tooling and interoperability.
The progression of CloudEvents to a graduated project under CNCF reflects its maturity and significance, aligning with CNCF’s project maturity levels of sandbox, incubating, and graduated projects, according to the CNCF.
