Introduction and release notes for the Alibaba Cloud Knative component - Container Service for Kubernetes

Knative is an open source serverless framework built on Kubernetes clusters. It offers a cloud-native, cross-platform standard for serverless orchestration. The Knative Serving component is the core of Knative. It manages serverless workloads and provides features such as application deployment and multi-version management. It can also scale application instances down to zero when there is no service traffic. ACK Knative offers a fully managed Serving component. This topic describes the release notes for the Knative Serving component.

Component overview

ACK Knative is fully compatible with community Knative and deeply integrated with the Alibaba Cloud product ecosystem. This integration enhances its capabilities and offers a wider range of solutions. For more information about Knative, see Knative overview.

Knative consists the following core components, which provide different features:

Knative Serving: provides serverless workload management capabilities. Knative Serving enables serverless deployment, version management, and canary releases for your applications. Knative Serving also supports pod auto scaling based on resource requests. If no traffic is processed, the number of pods is scaled to zero.
Knative Eventing: provides event management capabilities, which allow you to interface with external event sources, register and subscribe to events, and filter events. The event system decouples event producers and event consumers.
Knative Functions: allows you to create, build, and deploy Knative Services in an efficient manner. You can deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative Services to a Kubernetes cluster by using Knative Functions without the need to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology stack, such as Kubernetes, containers, and Knative.

Usage notes

For more information about how to use Knative, see Deploy and manage the Knative component. For more information about how to manage and upgrade the Knative component, see Manage the Knative component and Upgrade the Knative Serving component.

Release notes

November 2025

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.18.1.8	November 28, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.31 or later. New features: Compatible with community Knative 1.18.1. Supports Gateway API. Supports the AI inference gateway Gateway with Inference Extension.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2025

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3.15	September 9, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.30 or later. New features: Supports wildcard domain names for Knative services. Supports ACS reserved instances.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2025

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3-aliyun.9	June 25, 2025	Important The cluster version must be 1.30 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.16.3. Supports HostPath. Supports custom `terminationGracePeriodSeconds` and decouples it from the `timeoutSeconds` parameter settings.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2024

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.14.2-aliyun.6	December 26, 2024	Important The cluster version must be 1.28 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.14.2. Supports liveness and readiness probes for multiple containers. Supports checking `ContainerHealthy` for all containers to determine if the revision is ready.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

November 2024

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.12.7-aliyun.6	November 12, 2024	Integrates Knative with EventBridge. Supports `StartupProbe`.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2024

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.12.5-aliyun.7	September 9, 2024	Adapts to Kourier 1.12. Adapts the image repository to ACR Enterprise Edition. Supports ECS spot instances. In ACK virtual node scenarios, supports specifying reserved instances as the ECI resource type.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2024

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.12.4-aliyun.7	June 18, 2024	Important The cluster version must be 1.26 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.12.4. ACK managed clusters support hosting for Knative control plane components, including `controller`, `autoscaler`, and `webhook`. These components no longer consume your pod resources. When you install Knative in a cluster, the Knative control plane components are automatically hosted. Optimizes the user experience of integrating Knative with ASM. Optimizes the log output of the queue-proxy component.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

May 2024

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.10.9-aliyun.7	May 23, 2024	Supports configuring both private and public network ALB instances at the same time. 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 down to zero in ACK serverless clusters.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.10.6-aliyun.1	December 25, 2023	Important The cluster version must be 1.26 or later. Supports reusing existing ALBs. Knative Service supports the Downward API. Fixes CVE-2023-48713.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

October 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.3-aliyun.1	October 17, 2023	Supports configuring an MSE gateway through DomainMapping in Knative for HTTPS certificate access. Fixes an issue with scaling in reserved instances.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

July 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.8.2-aliyun.1	July 20, 2023	Important The cluster version must be 1.24 or later. Knative creates a specific number of pods during the initial service phase based on the `autoscaling.knative.dev/activation-scale` setting. This handles traffic spikes when requests scale up from zero. Supports upgrading Knative from 1.4.x to 1.8.2.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2023

Version

Change time

Changes

Change impact

v1.4.5-aliyun.1

June 19, 2023

ACK Serverless Knative supports scaling pods down to zero based on the MSE gateway.

Supports KServe.

This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

May 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.4.3-aliyun.1	May 18, 2023	Supports MSE gateways. Supports precise elastic scaling based on concurrent requests.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

April 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.4.2-aliyun.1	April 26, 2023	Compatible with Kubernetes 1.26. Supports AHPA for GPU metric prediction. Fixes an issue with the Kourier gateway version.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2023

Version	Change time	Changes	Impact
v1.4.1-aliyun.1	March 23, 2023	Supports reserved instances. The podspec-fieldref parameter is enabled by default. Fixes a startup issue with Kafka Source.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.