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

Knative is an open-source, Kubernetes-based Serverless framework that provides a cloud-native, cross-platform orchestration standard. Knative Serving is the core component for managing Serverless workloads, including application deployment and multi-version management, with scale-to-zero when idle. ACK Knative provides a fully managed, maintenance-free Serving component. This topic documents Knative Serving release notes.

Components

Fully compatible with open-source Knative, ACK Knative integrates deeply with Alibaba Cloud for enhanced features and broader solutions. See Knative overview.

Knative includes the following core components, each serving a distinct purpose:

Knative Serving: Manages serverless workloads by handling application deployment, versioning, request-based auto scaling, and canary releases. It automatically scales application instances to zero when they are not in use.
Knative Eventing: Provides a comprehensive framework for event management, including connecting to event sources, registering and subscribing to events, and filtering events. This model effectively decouples event producers from consumers.
Knative Functions: Offers a simple way to create, build, and deploy Knative services without needing deep knowledge of the underlying technology stack, such as Kubernetes, containers, or Knative itself. You can use Knative Functions to deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative services on your Kubernetes cluster.

Usage

Get started with Deploy and manage Knative components. You can also Manage Knative components or Upgrade the Knative Serving component.

Release notes

April 2026

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.18.3.1	April 20, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. Added session affinity for 1-to-1 request forwarding per session. Added Agent Sandbox, an isolated execution environment for intelligent agents.	This update does not affect your workloads. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2026

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.18.2.2	March 20, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. When the Knative Pod Autoscaler (KPA) scales in, idle pods are now prioritized for termination. Added support for ALB traffic mirroring configurations. The `drain-timeout` setting in the queue-proxy is now customizable.	This update does not affect your workloads. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

January 2026

Version	Change date	Change description	Impact
v1.18.1.22	January 12, 2026	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. Fixed repeated creation of reserved instances. Fixed an Application Load Balancer (ALB) Ingress reconciliation issue. Fixed a net-istio installation failure.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

November 2025

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v1.18.1.10	November 28, 2025	Important Requires cluster version 1.31 or later. New features: Added compatibility with community Knative 1.18.1. Added Gateway API support. Added AI inference gateway (Gateway with Inference Extension) support.Gateway with Inference Extension support.	This upgrade does not impact your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

September 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3.15	September 9, 2025	Important Requires cluster version 1.30 or later. New features: Added wildcard domain support for Knative services. Added ACS reserved instance support.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2025

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.16.3-aliyun.9	June 25, 2025	Important Requires cluster version 1.30 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.16.3. Added HostPath support. Added customizable `terminationGracePeriodSeconds`, now decoupled from `timeoutSeconds`.	This upgrade does not impact your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2024

Version	Change date	Change description	Impact
v1.14.2-aliyun.6	December 26, 2024	Important Requires cluster version 1.28 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.14.2. Supports liveness and readiness probes for multiple containers. Checks `ContainerHealthy` across all containers to determine Revision readiness.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

November 2024

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

September 2024

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v1.12.5-aliyun.7	September 9, 2024	Supports Kourier 1.12. Image repositories now support Alibaba Cloud Container Registry (ACR) Enterprise Edition. Supports the overview page for ECS preemptible instances (Spot Instances). In ACK virtual node scenarios, supports specifying reserved instances as Elastic Container Instance (ECI) resource types.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2024

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v1.12.4-aliyun.7	June 18, 2024	Important Requires cluster version 1.26 or later. Compatible with community Knative 1.12.4. ACK managed clusters now host Knative control plane components, including `controller`, `autoscaler`, and `webhook`, freeing up pod resources. Hosting starts automatically when you install Knative. Improved Knative integration with ASM. Optimized queue-proxy log output.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

May 2024

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v1.10.9-aliyun.7	May 23, 2024	Added support for configuring private and public ALB instances simultaneously. Fixed DomainMapping deletion clearing routing rules. Fixed repeated creation of reserved instances. Added scale-to-zero for Knative applications in ACK Serverless clusters.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

December 2023

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

October 2023

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v1.8.3-aliyun.1	October 17, 2023	Added DomainMapping support for MSE gateway HTTPS access. Fixed a scale-in issue for reserved instances.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

July 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.8.2-aliyun.1	July 20, 2023	Important Requires cluster version 1.24 or later. Knative pre-creates pods at startup based on the `autoscaling.knative.dev/activation-scale` setting to handle traffic bursts when scaling from zero. Upgraded Knative from 1.4.x to 1.8.2.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

June 2023

Version

Date

Description

Impact

v1.4.5-aliyun.1

June 19, 2023

ACK Serverless Knative now supports scale-to-zero with the MSE gateway.

Added KServe support.

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

May 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.3-aliyun.1	May 18, 2023	Supports MSE gateways. Supports precise auto scaling based on request concurrency.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

April 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.2-aliyun.1	April 26, 2023	Added Kubernetes 1.26 support. Added AHPA GPU metric prediction. Fixed Kourier gateway version issue.	This upgrade does not affect services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.

March 2023

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v1.4.1-aliyun.1	March 23, 2023	Added reserved instance support. The podspec-fieldref parameter is now enabled by default. Fixed Kafka Source startup issues.	This upgrade does not affect your services. Upgrade during off-peak hours.