Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces the Graduation of CloudEvents

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Jan 25, 2024, 12:00 ET

CloudEvents cultivates event metadata interoperability across services and systems

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of CloudEvents. CloudEvents is a specification for exposing event metadata in a common way to provide interoperability across services, platforms, and systems.

The CloudEvents project was developed by the CNCF Severless Working Group in May 2018 as the first step in the process of finding ways to improve the interoperability and user experience of serverless platforms. The project was accepted into the CNCF Incubator in late 2019 at the same time as reaching its V1 milestone. With CloudEvents, systems can now determine the high-level purpose of the event and determine the proper routing in an interoperable fashion without the need for custom event-specific understanding, or inspection of the event itself.

"CloudEvents started with a simple premise of trying to spec out what a common set of event metadata would look like across a variety of cloud native and serverless systems," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "We are thrilled to see the project graduate and be used by a variety of products and projects across the globe, including CNCF projects like Falco, Keptn, Knative, wasmcloud, and more."

Since its inception, the CloudEvents project has had over 340 contributors involved in the development of the specification from 122 different organizations. The Cloud Events spec has been adopted by an increasing number of organizations and products including Adobe I/O Events, Alibaba Cloud EventBridge, Azure Event Grid, the European Commission, Google Cloud Eventarc, IBM Cloud Code Engine, and many more.

"The simplicity of CloudEvents makes it unique. CloudEvents was created to reuse existing technology/specifications when available which "augments" existing eventing infrastructure, rather than suggesting a replacement," said Doug Davis, co-chair of CloudEvents and the CNCF Serverless Working Group. "This means that any existing eventing message flow can be modified slightly to enable CloudEvents, and thus, CloudEvent-enabled infrastructure can work seamlessly with non-CloudEvent-enabled infrastructure. I believe that this is one of the reasons CloudEvents has been so easily adopted by the community."

As a foundational specification, CloudEvents is being used as part of many projects - both within the open source community as well as within enterprises. Within CNCF, CloudEvents adopters include Argo, Falco, Harbor, Knative, and Severless Workflow. The project has also developed a set of SDKs in nine different programming languages, to help in the creation and processing of CloudEvent-enabled events.

Since CloudEvents is part of the CNCF's Serverless Working Group, the project has also been looking at other community pain points related to serverless technologies. As a result, the Serverless Workflow project (now a CNCF incubator project) was initially started as an off-shoot from CloudEvents. And, more recently, the CloudEvents team started a new project called xRegistry which aims to develop a standard set of APIs for registries - allowing for the development of common tooling and interoperability between registries.

Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated project. For more information on what qualifies a technology for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria v.1.3.

To learn more, be sure to attend the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Paris from March 19 – 21, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, Utah from November 12 – 15.

Supporting Quotes

"Microsoft has embraced CloudEvents in a range of cloud services and development tools already and is standardizing its event formats on CloudEvents across most of its businesses. CloudEvents is used to raise events from the Microsoft Graph underlying its Microsoft 365 productivity suite and it's the standard event model for events raised by its Azure cloud services. Billions of CloudEvents are raised and handled every day in the Microsoft Cloud and customer applications. CloudEvents is the standard event model for the DAPR runtime and other open source projects originating at Microsoft, and there are numerous Microsoft customers across several industries that have adopted CloudEvents as their standard convention for events inside their vertical solutions. What Microsoft and those customers most appreciate about CloudEvents is that it's a simple data model with a focus on describing the context of events that works with numerous popular protocols and data encodings in a uniform way, without trying to invent new protocol features or getting in the way of the protocol features that exist."
- Clemens Vasters, Principal Architect, Microsoft

"Knative Eventing leverages CloudEvents, empowering users to build event-driven applications on Kubernetes. By embracing CloudEvents, Knative Eventing users can receive and direct events from diverse systems in a standardized and easy to use format. Furthermore, using CloudEvents facilitates easy collaboration and integration with various projects from very different open source communities, such as Apache Camel, Tekton, and Quarkus, requiring significantly less effort and coordination."
- Pierangelo Di Pilato, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

"CloudEvents serve as an important component of Solace's vision of open-standards based event ecosystem - one that is shared by our enterprise customers around the world. Event-driven integration is being adopted as the go-to architecture and so standards like CloudEvents are essential to increasing interconnectivity, inside and across enterprises."
- Jesse Menning, Senior Principal Architect, Solace

"The CloudEvents specification has been used as a foundation in SAP's Business Technology Platform for alignment across applications and platform services like SAP Event Broker for SAP cloud applications, SAP BTP Kyma runtime, SAP Event Mesh and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh. Adhering to the open CloudEvents specification provides interoperability across messaging protocols and its extensibility simplifies customer adoption. Sustained open-source innovation is vital to our software strategy which forms the basis of our customers' transformation journey aiming at enhanced agility, interoperability, and resilience of their business. SAP is delighted to have helped CloudEvents towards graduation and looks forward to continued collaboration with the project and community."
- Klaus Deissner, Development Architect, SAP

To learn more about CloudEvents:

Check out the project website and GitHub repository.
Read the documentation.
Join the community Slack.
Follow the project on Twitter.
Review the security audit findings.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Jessie Adams-Shore
The Linux Foundation
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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation