Knative component introduction and release notes - Container Compute Service

Knative is an open source Kubernetes-based serverless framework that provides a cloud-native and cross-platform orchestration standard for serverless applications. Knative Serving is the core component of Knative. It provides serverless workload management capabilities, including serverless deployment and version management. Knative Serving also supports pod auto scaling based on resource requests. If no traffic is processed, the number of pods is scaled to zero. ACS Knative provides a fully-managed, O&M-free Serving component. This topic describes the release notes for the Knative Serving component.

Introduction

This component is completely compatible with Knative. In addition, ACS Knative is interfaced with Alibaba Cloud services to further enhance service capabilities and provide more solutions. For more information about Knative, see Knative overview.

Knative includes the following core components, each with distinct functions.

Knative Serving: Manages serverless workloads and provides capabilities such as application deployment, multi-version management, request-driven auto scaling, and canary releases. It can also scale application instances down to zero when there is no traffic.
Knative Eventing: Provides event management capabilities, including connecting event sources, event registration and subscription, and event filtering. This event-driven model effectively decouples producers from consumers.
Knative Functions: Offers a simple way to create, build, and deploy Knative Services. You can deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative Services to your Kubernetes cluster without needing in-depth knowledge of the underlying technology stack, such as Kubernetes, containers, or Knative.

Usage notes

For more information about how to use Knative, see Deploy Knative.
For more information about how to manage Knative, see Manage Knative components and Upgrade a Knative component.

Release notes

April 2026

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.3.1	April 20, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. Added support for session persistence for precise, session-based request forwarding. Added support for Agent Sandbox, which provides an isolated execution environment for agents.	This update has no impact on your existing services. We recommend that you upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2026

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.2.2	March 20, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. Updated the KPA to prioritize terminating idle pods during scale-in operations. Added support for configuring ALB traffic mirroring. Added support for customizing the `drain-timeout` in queue-proxy.	This update has no impact on your existing services. We recommend that you upgrade during off-peak hours.

January 2026

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.1.22	January 12, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. Fixed an issue where reserved instances were repeatedly created. Resolved a reconciliation issue with ALB Ingress. Fixed an installation failure of net-istio.	This update has no impact on your existing services. We recommend that you upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.1.10	December 18, 2025	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. New features: Added compatibility with community Knative version 1.18.1. Added support for the Gateway API. Added support for the Gateway with Inference Extension.	This update has no impact on your existing services. We recommend that you 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.

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.