CloudEvents cultivates event metadata interoperability across services and systems
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, 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.
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“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.
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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.
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