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Knative

Knative is a CNCF graduated platform that extends Kubernetes to provide serverless capabilities. It consists of Serving for deploying and scaling serverless workloads with automatic scale-to-zero, and Eventing for building event-driven architectures with declarative event routing and delivery. Knative abstracts away infrastructure complexity so developers can focus on writing code.

agent ready

Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Knative the way a machine reads it — 27 machine-readable artifacts across 13 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Knative scores 61.4/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 54/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 61.4/100 · strong
Contract Quality 21.7 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 7.4 / 20
Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20
Operational Transparency 6.8 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 54/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 6 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Knative

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Knative. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 13

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Knative Functions

Knative Functions enables developers to create, build, and deploy stateless, event-driven functions as Knative Services using the func CLI or the kn func plugin. Functions can b...

Knative CLI (kn)

The Knative CLI (kn) provides a command-line interface for creating and managing Knative resources including Services, Revisions, Routes, event sources, and Brokers. It simplifi...

Knative Apis API

The Apis API from Knative — 2 operation(s) for apis.

Knative Brokers API

Knative Broker resources collect pools of events that can be consumed using Triggers. Brokers provide event routing with filtering, guaranteed delivery, and dead-letter sink sup...

Knative Channels API

Knative Channel resources represent a generic pub/sub messaging channel. Channels receive events and fan them out to all Subscriptions. The default channel implementation uses a...

Knative Configurations API

Knative Configuration resources maintain the desired state for a deployment by capturing container templates. Each update to a Configuration creates a new immutable Revision.

Knative DomainMappings API

Knative DomainMapping resources map a custom domain name to a Knative Service, enabling services to be served under custom hostnames with automatic TLS certificate provisioning.

Knative EventSources API

Knative event source resources connect external event producers to the eventing mesh. Built-in sources include ApiServerSource for Kubernetes API events, PingSource for schedule...

Knative EventTypes API

Knative EventType resources maintain a catalog of event types that can be consumed from Brokers. EventTypes help consumers discover what events are available without inspecting ...

Knative Revisions API

Knative Revision resources are immutable snapshots of application code and configuration at a point in time. Revisions are created by Configuration updates and are the actual un...

Knative Routes API

Knative Route resources manage the network endpoints and traffic distribution across Revisions. Routes support percentage-based traffic splitting for canary deployments and name...

Knative Subscriptions API

Knative Subscription resources define a delivery destination for events sent to a Channel. Each Subscription routes events from a Channel to a subscriber destination with option...

Knative Triggers API

Knative Trigger resources define filtered delivery options for events arriving at a Broker. A Trigger selects events by attribute filters and routes matching events to a destina...

Scroll within the panel for all 13 ·

Open Collections 2

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Knative Eventing API

OPEN COLLECTION

Knative Serving API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Knative Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Knative Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Event Specifications 1

Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.

AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.

Knative Eventing CloudEvents

Knative Eventing uses HTTP POST requests conforming to the CloudEvents specification to deliver events between event sources, Brokers, Triggers, Channels, and Subscriptions. Eve...

ASYNCAPI

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Knative Context

2 classes · 21 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Knative API Rules

8 rules · 7 warnings

SPECTRAL

Knative API Rules

6 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

Knative Eventing Resources

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Knative Serving Resources

0 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Knative Authentication

http · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Knative Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Knative Agentic Access

42 operations · 20 acting

42 operations · 20 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Knative — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Build 2

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 3

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/knative · machine-readable index on apis.io