GitOps Cookbook

Chapter 6. Cloud Native CI/CD

In the previous chapter you learned about Helm, a popular templating system for Kubernetes. All the recipes from previous chapters represent a common tooling for creating and managing containers for Kubernetes, and now it’s time to think about the automation on Kubernetes using such tools. Let’s move our focus to the cloud native continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Continuous integration is an automated process that takes new code created by a developer and builds, tests, and runs that code. The cloud native CI refers to the model where cloud computing and cloud services are involved in this process. The benefits from this model are many, such as portable and reproducible workloads across clouds for highly scalable and on-demand use cases. And it also represents the building blocks for GitOps workflows as it enables automation through actions performed via Git.

Tekton is a popular open source implementation of a cloud native CI/CD system on top of Kubernetes. In fact, Tekton installs and runs as an extension on a Kubernetes cluster and comprises a set of Kubernetes Custom Resources that define the building blocks you can create and reuse for your pipelines.¹ (See Recipe 6.1.)

The Tekton engine lives inside a Kubernetes cluster and through its API objects represents a declarative way to define the actions to perform. The core components such as Tasks and Pipelines can be used to create a pipeline to generate artifacts and/or containers ...