CNCF, which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, has announced the graduation of KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling). A single-purpose event-driven autoscaler for Kubernetes, KEDA 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.

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.

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.