Deprecate the Knative/KEDA deployment path (ADR-0041)

[pdettori]

Deprecate the Knative/KEDA deployment path (ADR-0041)

Implements the ADR-0041 rollout: the record itself, the runtime and docs signals, and the RA1 §10.3 audit that gates labeling. Planned as two stacked PRs (docs, then signals); with neither opened yet, both ride here together in order.

The record

• ADR-0041 (docs/adrs/0041-deprecate-knative-keda-deployment.md): the Knative + KEDA deployment model — the Knative Service, KEDA ScaledJobs, KubectlTransport, pod-exec sandboxes, deploy/knative/ — is deprecated as of 2026-10-11. Security and breakage fixes only; removal no earlier than end of October 2026, and only once the remaining users have confirmed migration. Scope is ADR-0037's: the deployment model, not Kubernetes as a substrate (deploy/k8s/ is a first-class migration destination) and not containers as a sandbox technology. Status flips on the superseded ADRs and specs.
• docs/migrating-from-knative.md: the user-facing migration guide.

The signals

• packages/knative-server/src/deprecation.ts — single source of the notice text, guarded by Knative env detection (K_SERVICE/K_CONFIGURATION/K_REVISION).
• server.ts startServer() warns once at boot — only under Knative Serving.
• leaf-job.ts (the KEDA drainer) warns unconditionally — that entrypoint only ever runs as a KEDA ScaledJob, so there is no P6 path to protect.
• cron-dispatch.ts (the CronJob on-ramp) warns unconditionally as the first statement of main() — same safety argument: it only ever runs as deploy/knative/leaf-cron.yaml's CronJob. (Added in the review fix pass — the CronJob pod restarts on every schedule, so its logs are the one channel that repeatedly reaches a scheduled-dispatch-only operator.)
• Banners under the title of all six deploy/knative/ guides; stderr notices in all four setup scripts (setup-kind.sh, setup-ocp.sh, setup-k8s.sh, mocactl-quickstart.sh), printed before anything else so a script that dies on prerequisites has already said why it is deprecated.

The P6-silence invariant

The P6 supervisor forks knative-server/src/worker.ts without Knative env vars, so that shared code must never emit the warning. The guard is the env vars, never the entrypoint. Pinned by packages/knative-server/test/deprecation.test.ts: worker.ts never imports deprecation.js, the server wiring sits inside startServer() (anchored before prepareServerProcess), and a spawned leaf-job prints the notice before its first boot refusal.

The RA1 §10.3 audit

worker.ts vs supervisor/src/pool.ts compared hunk-by-hunk (356 vs 468 lines, 423/311): the only literal duplication is the two IPC unions, deliberate per spec §9 and drift-protected by real-worker.integration.test.ts; every worker-side export is the child half of a deliberate parent/child split, none Knative-specific. No missing behavior found — knative-server keeps entry-point labels only (leaf-job.ts); the package stays unlabeled. Recorded as ADR-0041's first Revisions entry.

Verification

• make lint — exit 0
• make typecheck — exit 0
• make test-deploy — exit 0
• packages/knative-server — 512/512 tests across 34 files (local Redis), including the review fix pass

Assisted-By: Claude (Anthropic AI) noreply@anthropic.com

[ingpaolodettori-dev]

A clean, well-scoped deprecation. The new head (b923522) adds the third runtime warning: cron-dispatch.ts now prints KNATIVE_DEPRECATION_NOTICE as the first statement of main(), before loadConfig can throw. That's correct. main() sits behind the exact isMainModule guard, so cron-dispatch.test.ts's imports of the pure helpers stay silent. The entrypoint runs only from deploy/knative/leaf-cron.yaml, so no P6 path is affected. deprecation.ts has no imports, so the CronJob picks up no new dependencies. The new test pins both the notice and its order ahead of the crash line on the missing-config fast-exit path.

Earlier checks still hold, because no other file changed since 84ef6e1. startServer() warns only under K_SERVICE/K_CONFIGURATION/K_REVISION. The P6 supervisor forks worker.ts, which never calls startServer and never imports deprecation.js. The setup-script banners come after set -euo pipefail. Every path linked from the migration guide exists.

Still open: the migration guide's call to action points at GitHub Discussions, which are disabled on this repo. There are also three small ADR nits, one of them new: the labeling decision doesn't mention cron-dispatch.ts's new @deprecated header.

Author: pdettori (MEMBER — maintainer)
Areas reviewed: TypeScript (knative-server), tests, Shell (deploy/knative setup scripts), Docs (ADR-0041, migration guide)
Agent/IDE config (.claude/.vscode): none
Commits: 9 commits, all signed-off: yes
CI status: passing (check, lint, proto, deploy-scripts, k8s-kind-e2e, microvm-gates, shellcheck, hadolint, CodeQL, Trivy, trivy-scan, dependency-review, DCO)

[ingpaolodettori-dev]

suggestion — GitHub Discussions are disabled on rossoctl/moca (has_discussions: false), so this link and the two others (line 56's "say so in the migration discussion", line 107's "Tell us when you have moved") lead nowhere. That matters more than a usual dead link, because removal is gated on the remaining users confirming migration, and this is the only channel the guide gives them. Either enable Discussions before merge, or point all three at a pinned tracking issue (e.g. "Knative/KEDA migration: tell us you've moved"). ADR-0041's Decision section could link the same place.

[ingpaolodettori-dev]

nit — "468 vs 356 lines" reads as worker.ts=468, pool.ts=356, but they're the other way round (wc -l: worker.ts 356, pool.ts 468), and the Revisions entry below and the PR body both say worker.ts 356 / pool.ts 468. Suggest "(356 vs 468 lines, …)".

[ingpaolodettori-dev]

nit — "lands in follow-up PRs on this branch": the rollout is landing in this PR and stacked #486, and an accepted ADR will outlive the branch. Suggest "lands in follow-up PRs (#485, #486)" or just "in follow-up PRs".

[ingpaolodettori-dev]

nit — Since b923522, cron-dispatch.ts carries an @deprecated header too, so this sentence now undercounts the labeled entrypoints. Suggest "leaf-job.ts and cron-dispatch.ts carry the @deprecated header" (and "three entrypoint warnings" wherever the rollout is summarized).