Alibaba Cloud Knative components and release notes - Container Service for Kubernetes

Knative is an open source serverless framework built on Kubernetes that provides a cloud-native, cross-platform standard for serverless orchestration. ACK Knative provides a fully managed Serving component. The Knative Serving component manages serverless workloads with automatic scaling, including scale-to-zero when no traffic is processed. This topic covers the core components of Knative and the release history of the Knative Serving component.

Component overview

ACK Knative is fully compatible with the open-source Knative community version and integrates with the Alibaba Cloud product ecosystem. For background on Knative, see Knative overview.

Knative consists of the following core components:

Component	Description
Knative Serving	Manages serverless workloads. Supports serverless deployment, version management, and canary releases. Scales pods automatically based on resource requests and scales to zero when no traffic is processed.
Knative Eventing	Manages events. Connects to external event sources, registers and subscribes to events, and filters events. Decouples event producers from event consumers.
Knative Functions	Creates, builds, and deploys Knative Services. Deploy stateless, event-driven functions to a Kubernetes cluster without requiring deep knowledge of Kubernetes, containers, or Knative.

Release notes

All upgrades in this section do not affect running services. Perform upgrades during off-peak hours.

November 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.1.10	November 28, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.31 or later.<br><br>New features: Compatible with Knative community version 1.18.1. Supports Gateway API. Supports the AI inference gateway Gateway with Inference Extension.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3.15	September 9, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.30 or later.<br><br>New features: Supports defining wildcard domain names for Knative services. Supports ACS reserved instances.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3-aliyun.9	June 25, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.30 or later.<br><br> Compatible with Knative community version 1.16.3. Supports HostPath. Supports custom `terminationGracePeriodSeconds`, decoupled from the `timeoutSeconds` parameter.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2024

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.14.2-aliyun.6	December 26, 2024	Important The cluster version must be 1.28 or later.<br><br> Compatible with Knative community version 1.14.2. Supports liveness and readiness probes for multiple containers. Supports checking `ContainerHealthy` for all containers to determine if a revision is ready.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

November 2024

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.12.7-aliyun.6	November 12, 2024	Integrates Knative with EventBridge. Supports `StartupProbe`.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2024

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.12.5-aliyun.7	September 9, 2024	Compatible with Kourier 1.12. The image repository is compatible with ACR Enterprise Edition. Supports the dashboard for ECS spot instances. In ACK virtual node scenarios, supports specifying ECI as the resource type for reserved instances.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2024

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.12.4-aliyun.7	June 18, 2024	Important The cluster version must be 1.26 or later.<br><br> Compatible with Knative community version 1.12.4. ACK managed clusters now host Knative control plane components (`controller`, `autoscaler`, and `webhook`). These components no longer consume pod resources. Control plane components are automatically hosted when you install Knative. Improves the Knative and ASM integration experience. Optimizes log output of the queue-proxy component.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

May 2024

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.10.9-aliyun.7	May 23, 2024	Supports configuring private and public ALB instances simultaneously. Fixes an issue where routing rules were purged when a DomainMapping was deleted. Fixes an issue where reserved instances were repeatedly created. Supports scaling Knative applications to zero in ACK serverless clusters.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.10.6-aliyun.1	December 25, 2023	Important The cluster version must be 1.26 or later.<br><br> Supports reusing existing ALBs. Knative Service supports the Downward API. Fixes CVE-2023-48713.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

October 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.8.3-aliyun.1	October 17, 2023	Supports using DomainMapping to configure an MSE gateway for HTTPS access with certificates. Fixes an issue with reserved instance scale-in.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

July 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.8.2-aliyun.1	July 20, 2023	Important The cluster version must be 1.24 or later.<br><br> Knative creates a specified number of pods during the initial service phase based on the `autoscaling.knative.dev/activation-scale` annotation. This handles traffic spikes when scaling up from zero. Supports upgrading Knative from version 1.4.x to 1.8.2.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.5-aliyun.1	June 19, 2023	ACK Serverless Knative supports scaling pods to zero based on the MSE gateway. Supports KServe.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

May 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.3-aliyun.1	May 18, 2023	Supports the MSE gateway. Supports precise elastic scaling based on concurrent requests.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

April 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.2-aliyun.1	April 26, 2023	Compatible with Kubernetes 1.26. Supports Advanced Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (AHPA) for GPU metric prediction. Fixes an issue with the Kourier gateway version.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.1-aliyun.1	March 23, 2023	Supports reserved instances. The `podspec-fieldref` parameter is enabled by default. Fixes an issue with Kafka Source startup.	No service impact. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

Container Service for Kubernetes:Knative components and release notes