Leveraging Tekton for Cloud Native CI/CD

Tekton is a newer entry in the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tooling space. It is open source and part of the Continuous Delivery Foundation set of projects. It stands out in the set of CI/CD tools that are cloud native and work with Kubernetes because, once installed, it runs natively on Kubernetes rather than reaching out to manage Kubernetes from a separate application. This means it includes many of the advantages and challenges that come with using Kubernetes itself.

Since it runs natively on Kubernetes, Tekton provides the most direct option for implementing CI/CD there. If you know how to work with Kubernetes, you will have a more direct path to leveraging and learning Tekton. Tekton also offers a potential path for common implementations of your CI/CD workflows via Kuberentes objects, so you don’t have to leverage yet another CI/CD application with a different architecture and interface.

Within Kubernetes, Tekton gets installed as an extension and creates Kubernetes resources to do its work. Its resulting objects are available via the Kubernetes API and the Kubernetes command line. Kubernetes, at its core, manages workloads via containers (implemented via Pods). Similarly, Tekton, at its lowest level, leverages containers to perform the actual steps of a workflow. (This is not unique to Tekton, but it usefully illustrates the different concerns involved in defining the workflow and how it is actually implemented ...