Tekton

About Tekton

Tekton is an open-source, Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework providing cloud-native pipeline primitives as Kubernetes CRDs, originally created by Google as part of the Knative project in 2018 and donated to the CD Foundation (now part of the Linux Foundation) in 2019. Tekton's design philosophy is building blocks over opinions — it provides the lowest-level Kubernetes-native pipeline primitives that platform engineers compose into custom CI/CD systems, not a pre-packaged CI/CD product. Tekton's core CRDs: Task (defines steps running containers in sequence), Pipeline (orchestrates Tasks with dependencies), TaskRun and PipelineRun (executes a Task or Pipeline with specific parameters), Workspace (shared volumes between tasks), and Trigger (starts PipelineRuns from webhooks or events). Each Tekton step runs in its own container on Kubernetes, inheriting full Kubernetes RBAC, resource limits, secrets management, and node scheduling. Tekton Chains (supply chain security) automatically signs task run results and artifacts with Sigstore/Cosign, producing SLSA provenance attestations. Tekton Hub hosts 100+ community-contributed tasks for Docker, kubectl, git-clone, buildpacks, and cloud providers. Tekton Operator simplifies installation and upgrades on Kubernetes clusters. Tekton is the CI engine underlying OpenShift Pipelines (Red Hat), Jenkins X, and several enterprise internal developer platforms. Its primary use case is platform engineering teams building internal CI/CD platforms on Kubernetes — it is not designed for teams wanting a ready-to-use CI/CD product out of the box.