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Tekton at cdCon

By September 21, 2020November 1st, 2023Blog, Staff

Tekton is a powerful and flexible open-source framework for creating CI/CD systems, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy across cloud providers and on-premise systems. Learn more about it at cdCon on October 7-8.

Wednesday, October 7

How the Tekton Community is Driving its Growth and Adoption
Speaker: Adam Roberts, IBM
Time: 11:05 AM PDT

Adam’s been a familiar figure in the Tekton community since it started, coming out of knative-build, so has been able to see it grow and develop rapidly. As a Tekton Dashboard maintainer, and someone that’s involved in Tekton every day, Adam’s looking to use this platform to highlight that not only is the project itself awesome, but the community is helping to drive its growth and adoption. Adam’s specifically referring to the “not just on GitHub” events that regularly occur and will be providing particular examples and insights into what makes the community project something special.

Cloud Native CD Pipelines with Tekton
Speakers: Andrea Frittoli, IBM
Time: 2:55 PM PDT

Tekton is an open-source project for building cloud-native CI/CD pipelines and systems. It provides reusable and lightweight building blocks, such as tasks, that embody best practices. Tekton, hosted by the CD Foundation, aspires to be the common denominator in CI/CD.
Tekton gives developers full flexibility in how to set up their workflows.
In this talk, we will present how to get started authoring cloud-native delivery pipelines; we will dig into the Tekton resources used to implement the CD pipelines that build, release, and deploy Tekton itself.

Measuring DevOps
Speaker: Dina Graves Portman, Google
Time: 3:30 PM PDT

Software metrics often pit different functions against each other and result in local optimizations at the cost of overall outcomes. Google’s research has developed and validated four metrics that provide a high-level systems view of software delivery and performance and predict an organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Accurate collection of the data required to measure the four key metrics can be time-consuming, error-prone, and incomplete. This session will introduce some automation with Google Cloud Platform that automates the generation and collection of the metrics required to measure the four key software delivery performance metrics.

Thursday, October 8

How to Clean Up Your DevOps Dumping Ground
Speakers: Melissa Sussmann & Kenaz Kwa, Puppet
Time: 1:35 PM PDT

As the automation surface area grows to accommodate hundreds of interconnected APIs on the cloud, developers are using their own, home-grown “digital duct tape” to manage a growing “DevOps dumping ground”. For a lot of organizations, home-grown glue logic is inconsistent, not repeatable, and expensive to maintain hundreds of event-based workflows and thousands of combinations. We believe that the answer lies in automation workflows. In particular, workflows-as-code that can be triggered by events. We want to replace engineers’ home-grown digital duct tape with reusable, event-driven workflows.
In an effort to deal with ad-hoc deployments and DevOps infrastructure CI/CD management, many devs try to create their own one-off automation tools or integration hubs, usually per team or project. 
Examples include:

  • Using Lambda and writing functions for EC2 management tasks
  • Running scheduled jobs for EBS cleanup
  • Repurposing a CI/CD tool like Jenkins for incident response workflows

But this “dumping ground” current approach is Inefficient, expensive, and risky​.​

  • Inefficient because work is done as one-offs that last forever, no reusability or repeatability
  • Expensive because spending time building tools and integrations aren’t directly delivering customer value
  • Risky because sidestepping governance to get stuff done can lead to exposure and failures

This presentation from Melissa Sussmann and Kenaz Kwa at Puppet gives viewers a peek into the beta version of Relay, a product for managing containerized apps. This presentation goes over what the team has learned in the process of working on Relay, the underpinnings of the product, and demonstrates a few example workflows to help you save time and money.

Conditional Constructs to the Rescue
Speakers: Priti Desai, IBM & Jerop Kipruto, Google
Time: 3:15 PM PDT

What do you do when your CI/CD use case is a bit more complicated than a simple build, test, deploy? What about when you want to build from a GitHub repo but only for a specific branch, deploy only if an image exists in the registry, or cleanup even when things fail?

Being able to express your CI/CD pipelines as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is powerful, but when you want to add conditions into your pipeline or take action even when things fail, it gets more complicated. In Tekton, execution order has historically been controlled by expressing dependencies between tasks in a pipeline, or by explicitly specifying the order.

In this session, we’ll take a look at how to express conditional behavior across several major CI/CD tools, and take a deep dive into how to use conditional constructs with Tekton:

  • Efficiently guard execution of a task with When Expressions
  • Reimagine the DAG with Finally

Register for cdCon

Don’t miss out on these great talks. Register for cdCon to attend.

cdCon has pledged to donate 100% of the proceeds received from cdCon 2020 registration to charitable causes: Black Girls Code, Women Who Code and the CDF Diversity Fund. Registrants indicate which charitable fund they want their 25 USD registration fees to go to during registration. If you can’t afford the registration cost, please apply for the diversity scholarship.

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