CloudEvents is an open-source specification for describing event data. The project aims to simplify event declaration and delivery across services and platforms. It is currently still in active development under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
The CNCF accepted CloudEvents into its incubator at the end of 2019.
According to the project’s website, currently the industry lacks a common way to describe events, causing developers to write new event handling logic for each event source.
“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, making it difficult to build portable tooling,” Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF, said at the time the project joined 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 and startups to implement and support the specification as part of its v1.0 and Incubation milestones.”
CloudEvents has SDKs available for Go, JavaScript, Java, C#, Ruby and Python; and integrates with a number of solutions such as Argo Events, Azure Event Grid, Google Cloud Eventarc, and IBM Cloud Code Engine.
Version 1.0.1 of the specification was released at the end of last year and addressed several clarifications from the 1.0 specification. In addition, it added new features such as WebSocket protocol binding. The full release notes are available here.
