Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Graduation of Kubernetes Autoscaler KEDA

The event-driven autoscaler is now used in production by more than 45 organizations, including FedEx, Grafana Labs, KPMG, Reddit, and Xbox

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation^® (CNCF^®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of KEDA.

Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) is a single-purpose event-driven autoscaler for Kubernetes that can be easily added to Kubernetes clusters to scale applications. It supports scaling workloads or scheduling long-running executions through Kubernetes Jobs and provides various authentication mechanisms for source integration. It also fills the gaps for use cases where the standard Kubernetes autoscaler, horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA), is not the right fit as they need to be scaled out on a different set of metrics, like custom metrics or metrics defined and exposed in a different system.

"KEDA has been an invaluable addition to how we manage workloads in Grafana Cloud by reducing toil and optimizing costs," said Salva Corts, Software Engineer at Grafana Labs.

"For example, we use it for automated scaling out workloads and for using spot VMs without compromising availability by automatically scaling out reliable backups when spot nodes are not available. We strongly believe that KEDA is production ready and has been for a long time. Becoming a CNCF Graduated Project will signal this to the wider CNCF community and increase well-deserved adoption even more."

"KEDA's magic enables autoscaling based on RabbitMQ queues and many other metrics, supercharging Zapier's efficiency and agility, which is a game-changer for us," said Ratnadeep Debnath, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Zapier. "KEDA helps Zapier manage workloads by using scalers that rely on application metrics. It's easy to use, well-documented, and has an awesome community. We're happy that KEDA has reached graduation status in CNCF and can't wait to see what happens next."

The project was started as a collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat in 2019. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2020 and moved into the Incubator in August 2021, demonstrating impressive growth over the past three years. Today the project is used in production by more than 45 organizations, including FedEx, Grafana Labs, KPMG, Reddit, Xbox, and more. It has added more than 60 scalers, or connectors, to external services and now supports nine authentication providers. The community has also added new contributors, maintainers, and features and collaborated with CNCF's TAG Environmental Sustainability to reduce its environmental footprint using efficient autoscaling and workload scheduling.

"We are immensely grateful to our vibrant community, dedicated users, and passionate contributors for propelling KEDA to become the go-to solution for application autoscaling on Kubernetes, and we are thrilled by the widespread adoption we can see," said Zbynek Roubalik, founder and CTO at Kedify. "We owe a special thanks to CNCF for their invaluable support and guidance, as their involvement has been instrumental in propelling the KEDA project forward and achieving this remarkable milestone."

"As we strive to make app autoscaling on Kubernetes dead-simple, it is great to see how KEDA has been adopted and become the application autoscaling standard for Kubernetes," said Tom Kerkhove, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft.

As a graduated project, the KEDA team plans to focus on improving performance, multi-tenant installation, and monitoring and observability features, as well as providing extensibility to streamline end-user experience for platform builders on top of KEDA. It plans to add capabilities to configure the scaling behavior and metrics evaluation, carbon and energy consumption to the scaling evaluation, and predictive autoscaling.

"KEDA makes Kubernetes application autoscaling simpler with its wide variety of scalers supporting many event sources covering the majority of widely used tools," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. "Since joining the CNCF Sandbox, the KEDA community has grown and improved the project in a sustainable way, and we look forward to seeing what it can accomplish as a Graduated project."

To officially graduate from incubating status, the KEDA improved its project governance, maintained a OpenSSF Best Practices badge, passed a CNCF-backed open source security audit, and more.

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.

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation