One of the CD Foundation’s founding and graduated projects, Tekton, is in the process of moving to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is also part of The Linux Foundation.
“The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Tekton as a CNCF incubating project.” Read the CNCF announcement.
Tekton’s journey at the CDF
The CD Foundation was created in 2019 around four founding projects: Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Spun out of the Knative Build component, Tekton was part of the CDF’s DNA from day one — and the foundation provided the neutral ground for it to grow into the project it is today.
During its time at the CDF, Tekton matured significantly:
- Reaching its stable v1.0 release
- Building a multi-vendor governance model with contributors from Red Hat, Google, IBM, and many individual contributors
- Establishing supply chain security through Tekton Chains, bringing signing and attestation to CI/CD pipelines
- Growing to 600+ contributors and 11,000+ GitHub stars
- Becoming the backbone of commercial offerings like Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery
Tekton became one of the CDF’s first Graduated projects — a milestone that reflects the technical maturity and governance health the project achieved under the foundation’s stewardship.
CDF’s Role in Tekton’s Maturity
The CDF provided more than a neutral home — it gave Tekton a community. Through events like cdCon, Tekton maintainers and users connected, shared ideas, and shaped the project’s direction together. Collaboration with sibling CDF projects was equally formative: Tekton was instrumental in creating CDEvents, bringing interoperability to CI/CD pipelines, and Shipwright chose Tekton as its foundation for container image builds.
In many ways, Tekton graduated from the CDF — it arrived as a young project and leaves as a mature, battle-tested framework that helped define what Kubernetes-native CI/CD looks like for the industry.
What does this mean for Tekton users?
Nothing changes for users. Tekton remains the same open source project with the same codebase, the same maintainers, and the same commitment to stability and backwards compatibility. The governance structure carries over, and all existing integrations, distributions, and tooling continue to work exactly as before.
“The CDF invested in Tekton at moments that mattered. The security audit the foundation sponsored in 2022 is one example — a concrete commitment to the project’s health that went well beyond providing a neutral home. The people we met, the community that grew around us, the conversations at cdCon — those stay with us. This transition is bittersweet; we’re grateful for everything the CDF has done for Tekton, and we look forward to continuing to work together across the two foundations.”
— Andrea Frittoli, Tekton Maintainer and Technical Oversight Committee Chair, CD Foundation
Not Goodbye, Just New Neighbors
As Andrea Frittoli noted when Shipwright made a similar move: “This isn’t truly goodbye — CNCF and CDF are open source community neighbors, there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration.”
The CDF and CNCF are both part of The Linux Foundation family, and the two foundations continue to collaborate on shared goals around continuous delivery, software supply chain security, and developer experience. CDF projects like CDEvents — which Tekton was instrumental in creating — continue to bridge both communities.
We celebrate Tekton’s journey and are proud of the role the CDF played in its growth. We wish the Tekton community all the best in their new home.