Originally posted to the IBM blog by Jerh O’Connor
We are delighted to announce the addition of the industry-leading Tekton capability to IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery pipelines.
With this new type of Continuous Delivery Pipeline, you define your pipeline as code using Tekton resource YAML stored in a Git repository. This lets you version and share your pipeline definitions while allowing you to configure, run, and view pipeline output in the familiar IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery DevOps experience.
Tekton Pipelines is an open source project, born out of Knative Build, that you can use to configure and run continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines within a Kubernetes cluster.
Tekton Pipelines are cloud native and run on Kubernetes using custom resource definitions specialized for executing CI/CD workflows. The Tekton Pipelines project is new and evolving and has support and active commitment from leading technology companies, including IBM, Red Hat, Google, and CloudBees.
For a closer look at Tekton, see our video “What is Tekton?”:06:49
What is Tekton?
In addition to the benefits of Tekton, this new capability in IBM Continuous Delivery provides the following unique features:
- A dashboard to easily view in-flight and completed Pipeline Run information
- Manual and Git triggering support
- Integration into the rich Open Toolchain ecosystem of integrations
How to get started
Getting started with CD Tekton-enabled pipelines requires a little setup. You will need the following:
- A Kubernetes cluster (you can quickly get one free from IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service)
- A Toolchain with a Private Worker Integration to link to your cluster, a Git integration to point to your Tekton pipeline-as-code, and a CD Tekton Pipeline.
- You can see a sample Tekton pipeline-as-code here.
Once you have these pieces in place, you need to configure the Tekton Pipeline to enable the running of your pipeline.
Click on the Tekton Pipeline tile on your toolchain dashboard to be taken to the configuration screen, where you will see notifications on what remains to be configured to use this new pipeline technology:
Select the required values in the Definitions tab, select your private worker in the Worker tab, and click Save.
You now need to set some trigger mappings via the Triggers tab so you can run the pipeline.
The simplest trigger is a manual trigger where you kick off a run yourself from the dashboard. You can also create Git triggers that fire based on git push and pull events as needed.
CD Tekton-enabled pipelines also provide a means of externalising reusable properties and provide a simple, secure method for storing sensitive information like apikeys via the Environment Properties tab.
Once the setup has been completed, the new Tekton Dashboard automatically updates to show information on in-flight and completed Pipeline Runs, showing the status of these runs and allowing the cancellation and deletion of runs.
In all cases, you can dig deeper into the logs and see the output of each Tekton Task and Step in the selected Pipeline run.
Caution: The Tekton Pipelines project is still in alpha and being actively developed. It is very likely that you will need to make changes to your pipeline definitions as the project continues to evolve
Watch the demo
Watch this short companion video for a demo of using our sample Tekton pipeline in IBM Cloud.
Contact
Now you can try it out yourself. For more information, see our documentation. If you have questions, engage our team via Slack by registering here and join the discussion in the #ask-your-question channel on our public Cloud DevOps @ IBM Slack.
We’d love to hear your feedback.
Learn more about Tekton by reading “Tekton: A Modern Approach to Continuous Delivery.”
