Tekton Pipelines — Cloud-Native CI/CD Primitives for Kubernetes

What it is

Tekton Pipelines is an open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems that run as native Kubernetes resources. Originally born from Knative Build at Google, Tekton became a standalone CNCF project and now powers pipeline engines in Jenkins X, OpenShift Pipelines, and IBM Cloud.

Tekton is built for platform engineers and DevOps teams who want their CI/CD system to be a first-class citizen in Kubernetes rather than a bolt-on monolithic server.

How it saves time or tokens

Tekton eliminates the need to maintain a separate CI server. Because Tasks and Pipelines are Kubernetes CRDs, they inherit cluster scheduling, resource limits, and RBAC. Each step runs in its own container, so language and tooling isolation is free. Typed parameters, results, and workspaces enforce contracts between steps, reducing debugging time on data-passing bugs.

How to use

1. Install Tekton Pipelines into your cluster:

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

1. Install the tkn CLI for interacting with pipeline runs:

brew install tektoncd-cli

1. Create and run a simple TaskRun:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: TaskRun
metadata:
  generateName: hello-
spec:
  taskSpec:
    steps:
      - name: echo
        image: alpine
        script: echo Hello Tekton

kubectl apply -f taskrun.yaml
tkn taskrun logs --last -f

Example

A minimal pipeline that clones a repo, runs tests, and builds a container image:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: build-and-test
spec:
  params:
    - name: repo-url
      type: string
  workspaces:
    - name: shared-data
  tasks:
    - name: fetch-source
      taskRef:
        name: git-clone
      workspaces:
        - name: output
          workspace: shared-data
      params:
        - name: url
          value: $(params.repo-url)
    - name: run-tests
      runAfter: [fetch-source]
      taskRef:
        name: run-tests
      workspaces:
        - name: source
          workspace: shared-data

Related on TokRepo

• DevOps automation tools — broader automation category for CI/CD and infrastructure workflows
• Coding tools for AI-assisted development — related tooling for developer productivity

Common pitfalls

• Forgetting to set resource requests on TaskRun steps, which can cause scheduling failures on constrained clusters
• Not using workspaces for data passing between tasks; relying on results alone hits size limits quickly
• Overlooking Tekton Chains for supply-chain security; without it, pipeline outputs lack signed provenance