Introduction to Tekton and Pipelines

6 October 2025 • 12:46 0 comments
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About this reading

This reading offers fundamental details about Tekton, outlining its advantages and the foundational elements that constitute the Tekton pipeline.

What is Tekton?

  • Tekton is a flexible, open-source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
  • It provides you with a basic set of building blocks that you can use to create CI/CD pipelines.
  • It works across both cloud providers and on-premises systems and anywhere you can run a Kubernetes cluster, you can run Tekton.

Benefits of using Tekton

  • Tekton is an open source project and it allows you to standardize your CI/CD tooling and processes across vendors, languages, and deployment environments.
  • Many popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins X, Skaffold, and Knative use Tekton as their base.
  • Tekton runs natively on your Kubernetes cluster, eliminating the need for a separate CI/CD solution.
  • Tekton renders great flexibility in how you design and customize your CI/CD pipelines.

Conceptual building blocks of Tekton

Event: An external event that causes a trigger to fire, which might be a pull request or a push to a Git repository.

Trigger: A trigger is fired by an event and is the stimulus that starts a pipeline run, which executes a pipeline.

Pipeline: A pipeline is a collection of tasks to execute. There's no limit to the number of tasks you could have in a pipeline, and these tasks can be executed serially or in parallel.

Tasks: A task is a unit of work that comprises one or more steps. It can also define the parameters required to carry out the steps and workspaces needed to store artifacts.

Steps: Steps are the actual commands that are executed to carry out the tasks, which can be any scripts or executable commands to build, test, and deploy applications.

YAML: YAML Ain't Markup Language (or YAML) is a human-readable data serialization language that is often used for writing configuration files. The YAML configuration files used for configuring tekton pipelines are:

  • tasks.yaml: It is used for specifying individual tasks or steps within a process.
  • pipeline.yaml: It outlines the steps and configurations for automating the process of building, testing, and deploying software applications.

In short, "pipeline.yaml" typically defines the entire CI/CD pipeline workflow, while "tasks.yaml" may be used for specifying individual tasks or steps within a process, and the specific usage can vary based on the tools or systems in use.

Physical building blocks of Tekton

CRD (Custom Resource Definition)

  • Tekton is a set of Kubernetes custom resource definitions or CRDs.
  • For each execution, there is a CRD associated, which include EventListener, TriggerBinding, TriggerTemplate, and PipelineRun.

Summary

In essence, everything about Tekton is Kubernetes native, and everything is running in your Kubernetes cluster. Thus, Tekton provides a comprehensive and Kubernetes-native solution for building, deploying, and managing CI/CD pipelines, fostering flexibility and standardization across diverse development environments.



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