eventing: [Experimental] DeliverySpec Timeout

Description Sink services are usually very heterogeneous, each one with different response time characteristics, depending on their functionality, the way they’re implemented, the guarantees the user wants. Because of that, timeouts of a request, when dispatching an event, may vary. DeliverySpec doesn’t give the ability to the user to specify the timeout of the single request, so we usually just default to something like 10 seconds. This is not enough, and doesn’t cover a lot of use cases where this parameter needs to be tuned.

This experimental feature proposed to add a new field to the DeliverySpec to define such timeout for each dispatched request.

Exit Criteria DeliverySpec allows to configure the timeout of the single request.

Experimental flag name: delivery-timeout

Experimental feature stages plan

Below the proposed plan for the feature stages (this list implicitly includes the requirements defined in the process)

• Alpha: Included in 0.24
  • Add in the API code the DeliverySpec.Timeout field https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/5149
  • Implement in kncloudevents module the handling of timeouts per-request https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/5503
  • Implement the glue code between the api field and kncloudevents module https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/5507
  • e2e test https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/5507
  • User documentation https://github.com/knative/docs/pull/3793
• Beta graduation as soon as 1 release after the inception.
• Beta:
  • User documentation stabilization and improvements
  • Add conformance tests https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/5565
• Stable graduation as 2 releases after the beta graduation
• Stable:
  • Add the requirement to support DeliverySpec.Timeout to the knative/specs repo: https://github.com/knative/specs/pull/15#issuecomment-808024302

Affected WG

• Event Delivery WG

Prior discussion

• https://github.com/knative-sandbox/eventing-kafka-broker/issues/757