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Tekton

A Kubernetes-native framework for building CI/CD pipelines.

Tekton runs CI/CD as native Kubernetes workloads. The core abstractions — Task, Pipeline, PipelineRun, TaskRun — are Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions, so pipelines and their runs are first-class cluster objects that can be inspected with kubectl, replayed, version-controlled, and managed alongside other Kubernetes manifests. Each step in a Task runs in its own container; results from earlier steps are passed to later steps through a small workspace abstraction.

Tekton was donated to the Continuous Delivery Foundation in 2019 and grew out of the Knative Build component. The Tekton Catalog hosts hundreds of community-curated reusable Tasks covering common operations (git clone, kaniko image build, buildah, npm publish, Helm deploy, and many more), which lets teams compose pipelines from existing building blocks.

Tekton is most often consumed indirectly: it is the engine underneath Red Hat's OpenShift Pipelines and Jenkins X, and several newer CI platforms (CDEvents, Tekton Pipelines) build on it. Direct use is most common at organisations that have already invested heavily in Kubernetes and want their CI to run on the same platform as their workloads, with the same RBAC, networking, and observability stack.

kubectl apply --filename https://storage.googleapis.com/tekton-releases/pipeline/latest/release.yaml