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 these core components:

Knative Serving: Manages serverless workloads with application deployment, multi-version management, request-based auto scaling, canary releases, and scale-to-zero when there is no traffic.
Knative Eventing: Integrates event sources and supports event registration, subscription, and filtering. Its event model decouples producers from consumers.
Knative Functions: Creates, builds, and deploys stateless, event-driven functions as Knative services on Kubernetes without deep knowledge of 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

July 2026

Version	Change date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.3.16	July 8, 2026	Important The cluster version must be 1.31 or later. Supports sharing warm-up pools across Knative Services. Supports persisting session affinity to OSS. Supports scaling for asynchronous Agent tasks.	This upgrade does not affect workloads. Perform the upgrade during off-peak hours.

April 2026

Version	Change date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.3.1	April 20, 2026	Important The cluster version must be 1.31 or later. Supports session affinity, providing accurate one-to-one request routing at the session level. Supports Agent Sandbox to provide an isolated execution environment for agents.	This upgrade does not affect workloads. Perform the upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2026

Version	Change date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.2.2	March 20, 2026	Important The cluster version must be 1.31 or later. When KPA scales in, idle Pods are removed first. Supports ALB traffic mirroring configuration. Supports customizing `drain-timeout` in queue-proxy.	This upgrade does not affect workloads. Perform the 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	Change date	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3.15	September 9, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.30 or later. New features: Supports defining wildcard domains for Knative Services. Supports ACS reserved instances.	This upgrade does not affect workloads. Perform the upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2024

Version	Change date	Changes	Impact
v1.12.5-aliyun.7	September 9, 2024	Adapted for Kourier 1.12. Image repository adapted for ACR Enterprise Edition. Supports the ECS preemptible instance (Spot instance) dashboard. In ACK virtual node scenarios, supports specifying ECI as the resource type for reserved instances.	This upgrade does not affect workloads. Perform the upgrade during off-peak hours.