At cdCon, two Jenkins talks will focus on new directions that the Jenkins platform is evolving too.

Tekton Hub provides a central hub for searching and sharing Tekton resources across many distributed Tekton catalogs hosted by various organizations and teams.

CDF Newsletter – May 2020 Article
Subscribe to the Newsletter
Contributed By Eric Sorenson
Tekton is a project that evolved from an internal Google tool that used Knative to build and deploy software. In 2018, it was spun out as an independent project and donated to the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
The core component, Tekton Pipelines, runs as a controller in a Kubernetes cluster. It registers several custom resource definitions which represent the basic Tekton objects with the Kubernetes API server, so the cluster knows to delegate requests containing those objects to Tekton. These primitives are fundamental to the way Tekton works. Tekton’s building block approach starts with the smallest atom of work, the Step, aggregates Steps together in Tasks, and aggregates Tasks together in Pipelines.
If the nomenclature here feels confusing, don’t feel bad — it is complicated! Each tool in the space uses slightly different terms; this is something we’re working on standardizing in the CDF Interoperability SIG. We’d love your input – here’s how to participate! Tekton’s usage of these terms is clarified in the sig-interop Vocabulary definitions doc:
* *Step*: a specific function to perform.
* *Task*: is a collection of sequential steps you would want to run as part of your continuous integration flow. A task will run inside a pod on your cluster.
* *ClusterTask*: Similar to Task, but with a cluster scope.
* *Pipeline*: stateless, reusable, parameterized collection of tasks. Tasks are linked together in a Pipeline, which describes the end-to-end deployment for an application.
* *PipelineRun*: an instantiation of a Pipeline definition, filling in the Pipeline’s parameters with concrete values
* *Pipeline Resource*: objects that will be input to or output from tasks
* *Trigger*: Triggers is a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD) controller that allows you to extract information from event payloads (a “trigger”) to create Kubernetes resources.
Notable omissions from the CRD list are “Steps”, which don’t have their own CRD because they’re the smallest unit of execution which are always contained inside a Task. The Conditions and Dashboard Extension CRDs are still optional and experimental — but very exciting!
Tekton’s approach is particularly interesting from a tool interoperability standpoint. By focusing on these building blocks and the concrete representation of them as declarative configuration, Tekton creates a standard platform for CD in the same way that Kubernetes provides a platform for application runtimes. This allows user-facing tools to build on the platform rather than reinventing these primitives. Several projects have already taken up this approach:
* Jenkins X uses Tekton as its execution engine. It’s been an option for a while now, but recently the project announced it was moving to using Tekton exclusively. Jenkins X provides pipeline definitions and gitops workflows that are tailored for cloud-native CD.
* Kabanero is a project that enables teams to develop and deploy applications on Kubernetes, so architects can provide pre-approved application stacks for developers to work from. It uses Tekton Pipelines and several associated projects like Tekton Dashboard and Triggers; indeed the developers building the Dashboard are largely working on Kabanero and the IBM Cloud Devops Pipeline product.
* Relay by Puppet is a hosted service that uses Tekton as the execution engine for event-triggered devops and deployment workflows. (Full disclosure, this is the product I am working on!) It provides a YAML dialect for building workflows that can be triggered by external events, via API, or manually, to automate tasks that need to stitch together different tools and services.
* TriggerMesh have integrated Tekton Pipelines into their TriggerMesh Cloud project and are working on a tool called Aktion to translate Github Actions into Tekton Pipelines.
* There are more, too! Check out the Tekton Friends repo for a longer list of projects and end users building on Tekton.
As exciting as this activity is, I think it’s important to note there’s still a lot of work to be done. There’s a distinct difference between two projects both using Tekton as a common upstream platform and achieving interoperability between them! It’s a big problem and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the magnitude of the whole thing. One of my earliest lessons when I moved from SRE into product management was: focus first on solving the pain points which end users feel most acutely. That can be some combination of pervasiveness (what percent of the overall user base feels it?) and severity (how bad is each individual incident?) – ideally, fix the thing which is worst on both axes! From an end user’s standpoint, CD tools have a pretty steep learning curve with a bunch of pitfalls. A sampling of these severe-and-pervasive pitfalls I’ve heard from our users as we’ve been building Relay:
* How do I wrap my head around the terminology and technology so I can get started?
* How do I integrate the parts of the build/test/deploy toolchain my organization needs to continue using?
* How do I operate (upgrade, monitor, troubleshoot) the tool once it’s up and running?
Interoperability isn’t a cure-all, but there are definitely areas where it could work like a soothing balm on all of this pain. Industry-standard terminology or at a minimum, an authoritative Rosetta Stone for CD, could help. At the moment, there’s still pockets of debate on whether the “D” stands for Deployment or Delivery! (It’s “Delivery”, folks – when you mean “Deployment” you have to spell it out.)
Going deeper, it’d be hugely helpful help users integrate the tools they’re already using into a new framework. A wide ecosystem of steps that could be used by any of the containerized CD tools – not just those based on Tekton but, for example, Spinnaker and Keptn as well – would have a number of benefits. For end users, it would increase the amount of content available “out of the box”, meaning they would have less work to integrate the tools and services they need. Ideally, no end-user should have to create a step from scratch because there’s a vast, easily discoverable library of things that accomplish the job they have. There’s also a benefit to maintainers of services and tools that end-users want, like Kaniko, Gradle, and the cloud services, who have to build an integration with each execution framework themselves or rely on the community to do it. Building and maintaining one reusable implementation would reduce the maintenance burden and allow them to provide higher quality.
To put on my Tekton advocate hat for a moment, its well-defined container contract makes it easy to use general-purpose containers in your pipeline. If you want to take advantage of more specialized features the framework provides, the Tekton Catalog has a number of high-quality examples to build from. There are improvements on the way to aid the discoverability and reuse parts of the problem, such as the exciting new Tekton Hub donated by Red Hat.
The operability concerns are a real problem for CD pipeline tools, too. Although CD is usually associated with development, in many organizations the tool itself is considered a production service, because if there are problems committing, building, testing, and shipping code, the engineering organization isn’t delivering value. Troubleshooting byzantine failures in complex CI/CD pipelines is a specialized discipline requiring skills that span Quality Engineering, SRE, and Development. The more resilient the CD tools are architected, and the more standard their interfaces for reporting availability and performance metrics, the easier that troubleshooting becomes.
Again, to address these from Tekton’s perspective, a huge benefit of running on Kubernetes is that the Tekton services that run in the cluster can take advantage of all the powerful k8s operability features. So fundamental capabilities that are highly valuable to operators and troubleshooters like log aggregation, in-place upgrades, error reporting, and scale-out all ride on top of the Kubernetes infrastructure. It’s not “for free” of course; nothing in distributed systems is ever truly “for free” and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, the thing they’re selling you is probably *very* expensive. But it does mean that general-purpose Kubernetes skills and tooling goes a long way towards operating Tekton at scale, rather than having to relearn or reimplement them at the application layer.
In conclusion, I’m excited that the interoperability conversation is well underway at the CDF. There’s a long way to go, but the amount of activity and progress in the space is very encouraging. If you’re interested in pitching in to discuss and solve these kinds of problems, please feel free to join in #sig-interoperability channel on the CDF slack or check out the contribution information.
You may have heard that Tekton Pipelines is now beta! That’s not beta like the video format but beta like Kubernetes! Okay I’ll stop trying to make jokes, because compatibility is no laughing matter for folks who want to build on top of and use Tekton, and that’s why we’ve declared beta, so that you can feel more confident in using it.
What exactly does beta mean for Tekton?
So what does beta mean exactly? It means for Tekton what it means for Kubernetes, and it boils down to two things:
- Features that are beta will not be removed; they might change but you can count on the features themselves sticking around
- Backwards incompatible changes to the API will be avoided; if they do have to happen you will be given at least 9 months worth of releases to migrate to the new way of doing things
You might be wondering what “the API” means in this context – good question! It’s the specifications of the CRDs themselves and runtime details like the special directories that Tekton makes.
Not all of Tekton is beta however! Right now it’s just Tekton Pipelines and it’s only the following CRDs:
- Tasks, ClusterTasks and TaskRuns
- Pipelines and PipelineRuns
This means that other types that you might like, such as Conditions and PipelineResources (see the next section!) are still alpha and don’t (yet!) have the same beta level guarantees.
You can always refer to our API compatibility docs in our repo if you forget!
What about PipelineResources?
What about them indeed! If you are part of the Tekton community, you’ll know that we keep going back and forth on our love/hate-able PipelineResources – the feature you love until it doesn’t work.
A few months ago, our “difficult to understand, hard to debug” friend was challenged by the community: what would the Tekton world look like without PipelineResources? And when we went on that journey, we discovered features which PipelineResources gave us which were super useful on their own:
So we focused on adding those features and brought them to beta. In the meantime, we keep asking the question: do we still need PipelineResources? And what would they look like if redesigned with workspaces and results? We’re still asking those questions and that’s why PipelineResources aren’t beta (yet)!
We know some users really love them: “There are dozens of us,” – @dlorenc. So we haven’t given up on them yet, and there are some things that you just still can’t do well without them: for example, how do you consistently represent artifacts such as images moving through Pipelines? You can’t! So the investigation continues.
In the meantime, we’ve made Task equivalents of some of our PipelineResources in the Tekton catalog, such as PullRequests, GCS, and git.
Tekton Website is Live Now!
Hooray! Our shiny new site is live! Right this way -> https://tekton.dev/
Tekton Documentation is now hosted on the website at https://tekton.dev/docs/. And interactive tutorials are hosted at https://tekton.dev/try/. There is just one interactive tutorial hosted right now but more are in process to get published, so watch this space!
What’s coming up next?
We’re hard at work on more nifty Tekton stuff to make your CI/CD Pipelines more powerful and more portable by achieving Tekton’s mission:
Be the industry-standard, cloud-native CI/CD platform components and ecosystem.
Check out more on our mission and our 2020 roadmap in our community repo.
THANK YOU!!! ❤️
Thanks to all of the many amazing contributors who have gotten us to this point! The list below is people credited in Tekton Pipelines release notes, but for the complete list of everyone contributing to Tekton check out our devstats!
- @16yuki0702
- @AlanGreene
- @Conky5
- @EliZucker
- @Fabian-K
- @Gl4di4torRr
- @GregDritschler
- @ImJasonH
- @Letty5411
- @MLBMatt
- @abayer
- @abergmeier
- @achedeuzot
- @adshmh
- @afrittoli
- @ahpook
- @akihikokuroda
- @assertion
- @bigkevmcd
- @bobcatfish
- @cagiti
- @cappyzawa
- @carlosgg
- @castlemilk
- @cccfeng
- @cezkuj
- @chandanikumari
- @chanseokoh
- @cheesesashimi
- @chhsia0
- @chmouel
- @danielhelfand
- @dewan-ahmed
- @dibbles
- @dibyom
- @dicarlo2
- @dlorenc
- @dmathieu
- @docwhat
- @dwnusbaum
- @eddycharly
- @fraenkel
- @frostmourner
- @gavinfish
- @girishramnani
- @gorkem
- @guillaumebreton
- @guitcastro
- @hongchaodeng
- @houshengbo
- @hrishin
- @impl
- @itoutki
- @jbarrick-mesosphere
- @jlpettersson
- @jonjohnsonjr
- @joseblas
- @josephlewis42
- @khrm
- @mattmoor
- @mattmoor-sockpuppet
- @mgreau
- @mikeykhalil
- @mnuttall
- @moficodes
- @moredhel
- @nader-ziada
- @nbarthwal
- @ncskier
- @nikhil-thomas
- @nilsotto
- @nlewo
- @othomann
- @paassdc
- @pivotal-nader-ziada
- @piyush-garg
- @pmorie
- @poy
- @pritidesai
- @pwplusnick
- @rawlingsj
- @rhuss
- @richardmarshall
- @rick-a-lane-ii
- @sbwsg
- @sergetron
- @shashwathi
- @shuheiktgw
- @silverlyra
- @skaegi
- @skeeey
- @sosiska
- @spomorski
- @sravankumar777
- @steveodonovan
- @sthaha
- @sthana
- @takirala
- @tariq1890
- @tejal29
- @thinkerou
- @tom1299
- @tomfrenken
- @tomgeorge
- @toshi0607
- @u5surf
- @vbatts
- @vdemeester
- @vincent-pli
- @vtereso
- @waveywaves
- @willbeason
- @withlin
- @wlynch
- @xtreme-sameer-vohra
- @zhangtbj
- @zouyee
- @zxDiscovery
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.”
Tekton Pipelines has shifted into beta, meaning the open source CD project is now looking for more contributors and testers.
Tekton Pipeline is the core component of the Tekton project, which is overseen by the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and is pitched to “configure and run continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines within a Kubernetes cluster.” It originated in Knative Build.
The project team said the beta means “most Tekton Pipelines CRDs (Custom Resource Definition) are now at beta level. This means overall beta level stability can be relied on.” However, other components, including Tekton Triggers, Dashboard, Pipelines CLI and more, “are still alpha and may continue to evolve from release to release”.
The team overseeing the development of the open source Tekton Pipelines under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation announced today the project is now in beta.
Christie Wilson, Tekton Project Lead and a software engineer at Google, said Tekton Pipelines are not necessarily a tool most DevOps teams will interact with directly. Rather they provide a foundation on which DevOps platforms can be built that will make it easier for DevOps teams to construct workflows spanning multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.
As such, Tekton Pipelines should play a critical role in not just fostering interoperability but also alleviating concerns about become locked into a specific CI/CD platform.
Tekton Pipelines, the major component in an open-source project for CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) on Kubernetes, has reached the milestone of beta status.
Tekton was originally Knative Build, what was then one of three major components in the Knative project, the others being serving and eventing. In June 2019, Knative Build was deprecated in favour of Tekton Pipelines. A Tekton pipeline runs tasks, where each task consists of steps running on a container in a Kubernetes pod.
Tekton Pipelines, the core component of the Tekton project, is moving to beta status with the release of v0.11.0 this week. Tekton is an open source project creating a cloud-native framework you can use to configure and run continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines within a Kubernetes cluster.
Try Tekton Now!
Tekton development began as Knative Build before becoming a founding project of the CD Foundation under the Linux Foundation last year.
The Tekton project follows the Kubernetes deprecation policies. With Tekton Pipelines upgrading to beta, most Tekton Pipelines CRDs (Custom Resource Definition) are now at beta level. This means overall beta level stability can be relied on. Please note, Tekton Triggers, Tekton Dashboard, Tekton Pipelines CLI and other components are still alpha and may continue to evolve from release to release.
Tekton encourages all Tekton projects and users to migrate their integrations to the new apiVersion. Users of Tekton can see the migration guide on how to migrate from v1alpha1 to v1beta1.
Full list of Features, Deprecation Notices, Docs, Thanks and lots more
Who’s using Tekton?
Tekton is in its second year of development and is currently being used by both free and commercial offerings by multiple companies.
- Puppet Project Nebula
- Jenkins X
- Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines
- IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery
- Kabanero – open source project led by IBM
- Rio – open source project led by Rancher
- Kf – open source project led by Google
Join Now!
Now is a great time to contribute. There are many areas where you can jump in. For example, the Tekton Task Catalog allows you to share and reuse the components that make up your Pipeline. You can set a Cluster scope, and make tasks available to all users in a namespace, or you can set a Namespace scope, and make it usable only within a specific namespace.
Get started Now!

From Dailymotion, a French video-sharing technology platform with over 300 million unique monthly users
At Dailymotion, we are hosting and delivering premium video content to users all around the world. We are building a large variety of software to power this service, from our player or website to our GraphQL API or ad-tech platform. Continuous Delivery is a central practice in our organization, allowing us to push new features quickly and in an iterative way.
We are early adopters of Kubernetes: we built our own hybrid platform, hosted both on-premise and on the cloud. And we heavily rely on Jenkins to power our “release platform”, which is responsible for building, testing, packaging and deploying all our software. Because we have hundreds of repositories, we are using Jenkins Shared Libraries to keep our pipeline files as small as possible. It is an important feature for us, ensuring both a low maintenance cost and a homogeneous experience for all developers – even though they are working on projects using different technology stacks. We even built Gazr, a convention for writing Makefiles with standard targets, which is the foundation for our Jenkins Pipelines.
In 2018, we migrated our ad-tech product to Kubernetes and took the opportunity to set up a Jenkins instance in our new cluster – or better yet move to a “cloud-native” alternative. Jenkins X was released just a few months before, and it seemed like a perfect match for us:
- It is built on top and for Kubernetes.
- At that time – in 2018 – it was using Jenkins to run the pipelines, which was good news given our experience with Jenkins.
- It comes with features such as preview environments which are a real benefit for us.
- And it uses the Gitops practice, which we found very interesting because we love version control, peer review, and automation.
While adopting Jenkins X we discovered that it is first a set of good practices derived from the best performing teams, and then a set of tools to implement these practices. If you try to adopt the tools without understanding the practices, you risk fighting against the tool because it won’t fit your practices. So you should start with the practices. Jenkins X is built on top of the practices described in the Accelerate book, such as micro-services and loosely-coupled architecture, trunk-based development, feature flags, backward compatibility, continuous integration, frequent and automated releases, continuous delivery, Gitops, … Understanding these practices and their benefits is the first step. After that, you will see the limitations of your current workflow and tools. This is when you can introduce Jenkins X, its workflow and set of tools.
We’ve been using Jenkins X since the beginning of 2019 to handle all the build and delivery of our ad-tech platform, with great benefits. The main one being the improved velocity: we used to release and deploy every two weeks, at the end of each sprint. Following the adoption of Jenkins X and its set of practices, we’re now releasing between 10 and 15 times per day and deploying to production between 5 and 10 times per day. According to the State of DevOps Report for 2019, our ad-tech team jumped from the medium performers’ group to somewhere between the high and elite performers’ groups.
But these benefits did not come for free. Adopting Jenkins X early meant that we had to customize it to bypass its initial limitations, such as the ability to deploy to multiple clusters. We’ve detailed our work in a recent blog post, and we received the “Most Innovative Jenkins X Implementation” Jenkins Community Award in 2019 for it. It’s important to note that most of the issues we found have been fixed or are being fixed. The Jenkins X team has been listening to the community feedback and is really focused on improving their product. The new Jenkins X Labs is a good example.
As our usage of Jenkins X grows, we’re hitting more and more the limits of the single Jenkins instance deployed as part of Jenkins X. In a platform where every component has been developed with a cloud-native mindset, Jenkins is the only one that has been forced into an environment for which it was not built. It is still a single point of failure, with a much higher maintenance cost than the other components – mainly due to the various plugins.
In 2019, the Jenkins X team started to replace Jenkins with a combination of Prow and Tekton. Prow (or Lighthouse) is the component which handles the incoming webhook events from GitHub, and what Jenkins X calls the “ChatOps”: all the interactions between GitHub and the CI/CD platform. Tekton is a pipeline execution engine. It is a cloud-native project built on top of Kubernetes, fully leveraging the API and capabilities of this platform. No single point of failure, no plugins compatibility nightmare – yet.
Since the beginning of 2020, we’ve started an internal project to upgrade our Jenkins X setup – by introducing Prow and Tekton. We saw immediate benefits:
- Faster scheduling of pipelines “runners” pods – because all components are now Kubernetes-native components.
- Simpler pipelines – thanks to both the Jenkins X Pipelines YAML syntax and the ability to easily decouple a complex pipeline in multiple small ones that are run concurrently.
- Lower maintenance cost.
While replacing the pipeline engine of Jenkins X might seem like an implementation detail, in fact, it has a big impact on the developers. Everybody is used to see the Jenkins UI as the CI/CD UI – the main entry point, the way to manually restart pipelines executions, to access logs and test results. Sure, there is a new UI and a real API with an awesome CLI, but the new UI is not finished yet, and some people still prefer to use web browsers and terminals. Leaving the Jenkins Plugins ecosystem is also a difficult decision because some projects heavily rely on a few plugins. And finally, with the introduction of Prow (Lighthouse) the Github workflow is a bit different, with Pull Requests merges being done automatically, instead of people manually merging when all the reviews and automated checks are green.
So if 2019 was the year of Jenkins X at Dailymotion, 2020 will definitely be the year of Tekton: our main release platform – used by almost all our projects except the ad-tech ones – is still powered by Jenkins, and we feel more and more its limitations in a Kubernetes world. This is why we plan to replace all our Jenkins instances with Tekton, which was truly built for Kubernetes and will enable us to scale our Continuous Delivery practices.