Microsoft-led KEDA project served into CNCF

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) adopted the Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) platform that was developed by Microsoft and Red Hat as a “Sandbox” project within the open source organization. The move adds another serverless-focused component under CNCF’s purview.

The KEDA platform, which was unveiled last year, tackles the eventing and autoscaling challenges of running serverless applications in a Kubernetes-orchestrated container environment. This is essentially to use a serverless event to activate and scale a Kubernetes deployment based on need.

KEDA itself was designed to allow developers to run serverless functions within a Kubernetes environment across other clouds and on-premises locations, and as the KEDA maintainers noted in a blog post “users can now treat their Kubernetes deployments like [function-as-a-service] or [platform-as-a-service] applications with ease.”

“KEDA enables a cloud-native app to scale directly on the event that your app is interested in, providing a much more accurate and responsive application,” explained Jeff Hollan, principal project manager for Azure Serverless at Microsoft, in an email to SDxCentral.

“By default, Kubernetes scales containers based on resource metrics like CPU and memory,” Hollan wrote in a separate blog post. “This isn’t an ideal fit for event-driven and serverless workloads where you need to rapidly scale based on events. … KEDA brings this capability for any container workload, enabling you to enhance Kubernetes and automatically drive scale up and down proactively, and based directly on the rate of events as they arrive.”

Hollan explained that the project was initiated when the Microsoft team found gaps in the Kubernetes ecosystem tied to its Azure Functions service. One of those included users not being able to migrate their Azure Functions running in Azure to other cloud platforms. At that point, Microsoft contacted Red Hat to develop what became KEDA.

The project hit a 1.0 milestone last November, which Hollan explained “was a huge turning point for the project as it allowed many more users and contributors to start using KEDA in production.”

And since that launch the project has rolled out a new release every month. The project itself now supports 19 event sources and can run alongside Virtual Kubelet and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Virtual Nodes.

Hollan said the project is looking to add support for more event sources and integration with the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), which Microsoft unveiled last year. SMI defines a set of common, portable APIs that support interoperability across service mesh technologies like Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect.

KEDA is also working with the Kubernetes autoscaling group to update the default Kubernetes scaling based on KEDA’s work “with the goal of requiring KEDA to do less and less, and lighting up these capabilities for the entire ecosystem,” Hollan added.

―SDX Central