Basics of Tekton

Updated October 2026 to reflect current versions.

Google developed Tekton, and first announced it in May 2019. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) now maintains it, and multiple companies are adopting it to automate their CI/CD on Kubernetes.

Tekton's Features:

• Pipelines: Use Tekton to create CI/CD pipelines on Kubernetes that automate the building, testing, and deployment of code to various environments.
• Tasks: Tekton provides a collection of reusable components known as “Tasks.” You can utilize these Tasks to perform common CI/CD operations, including building container images, running tests, or deploying to a Kubernetes cluster.
• Custom Workflows: Combine and arrange Tasks in a pipeline to create custom CI/CD workflows tailored to your specific needs.
• Workspaces: Shared volumes, such as PersistentVolumeClaims, that Tasks mount to pass source code and artifacts between pipeline steps.
• Params: Typed inputs you pass to Tasks and Pipelines at runtime, such as repository URLs, image tags, or build flags. Params replace the old PipelineResources input/output model, which has been removed from Tekton Pipelines.
• PipelineRuns: Define how a pipeline is executed. You can specify parameters passed to the Tasks and the service account used for Kubernetes cluster authentication.

Tekton's Adoption:

• Tekton is actively embraced by many organizations as an efficient means of automating their CI/CD processes in Kubernetes environments.

For more detailed information on Tekton, you can visit the official Tekton website.

Why was it invented? What problem are we looking to solve using Tekton?

“Google developed Tekton to address the need for a flexible and reusable CI/CD framework that tightly integrates with Kubernetes. At the time of its development, several existing CI/CD solutions were available. However, many of them required significant configuration and customization to work with Kubernetes, and many lacked the ability to easily reuse common tasks across different pipelines.

Tekton aims to provide a simple and consistent way for developers to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying their code to various environments, regardless of the programming language or application framework they use. By offering a set of reusable tasks and a straightforward pipeline definition format, Tekton simplifies the creation of custom CI/CD workflows that can be easily reused and shared among teams.

In addition, Tekton strives to integrate seamlessly with other Kubernetes-native tools and services, such as Kubernetes itself, Istio, Knative, and others. This integration makes it a natural fit for cloud-native architectures and modern software development practices like microservices, serverless, and containerization.

By providing a platform-agnostic solution that can run on multiple cloud providers, on-premises, or in a hybrid manner, Tekton offers companies a single source of truth for their CI/CD processes. This enhances efficiency and promotes collaboration among development teams.”

Tekton's key features

So how do you get started with using Tekton?

Installing Tekton Pipelines on a Kubernetes cluster is a single kubectl command using the official release manifest. The tkn command-line tool is a handy companion for managing Tekton resources once the installation is done.

Here's an overview of the process to install Tekton on a Kubernetes cluster:

1. Install the tkn CLI: You can install the tkn CLI from the tkn releases page — on macOS, run brew install tektoncd-cli; on Linux, .deb and .rpm packages are available.
2. Install Tekton Pipelines: Apply the official Tekton Pipelines release manifest:

kubectl apply --filename https://infra.tekton.dev/tekton-releases/pipeline/latest/release.yamlCode language: Bash(bash)

This creates the Tekton Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and the Pipelines controller in the tekton-pipelines namespace. (This manifest is ideal for a quick start; for production use, see the official Tekton installation guide.)

3. Monitor the installation: Watch the Tekton pods until they are all ready:

kubectl get pods --namespace tekton-pipelines --watchCode language: Bash(bash)

4. Install Tekton Triggers: The Tekton Triggers extension is optional, but it allows you to create more advanced CI/CD workflows by triggering pipelines based on events such as a new code push to a version control system. To install it, run:

kubectl apply --filename https://infra.tekton.dev/tekton-releases/triggers/latest/release.yamlCode language: Bash(bash)

5. Verify the installation: You can verify that the Tekton pipeline operator is running by checking the pods in the tekton-pipelines namespace:

kubectl get pods -n tekton-pipelinesCode language: Bash(bash)

Note that the above steps are a general guidance and some considerations such as cluster permission and namespace might vary depending on your installation environment. You should check the official Tekton documentation for more detailed instructions on how to install and configure Tekton on your specific platform.

So is learning Tekton worth your while?

Short answer is yes. But generally, Tekton is a relatively new open-source project, but it has already been adopted by a number of companies as a tool for automating their CI/CD on Kubernetes. Some examples of companies that are using Tekton include:

• Google: As the creator of Tekton, Google is one of the largest users of the framework. They use Tekton for the CI/CD of many of their internal services and for several of the products they offer to customers such as Google Cloud Run, Google Cloud Build and others.
• IBM: IBM is using Tekton to automate the CI/CD of their cloud-native applications and services. They have developed several Tekton-based CI/CD solutions, such as the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery service, which helps customers automate the deployment of their applications to the IBM Cloud.
• Salesforce: Salesforce has adopted Tekton as a core part of their development platform and have open sourced “Flow” – a suite of Tekton-based CI/CD tools that makes it easy for Salesforce developers to automate their development workflows and deploy to multiple environments.
• Atlassian: Atlassian has integrated tekton as part of their pipeline product, Bitbucket Pipelines, which allows customers to use the same pipeline definition both on their own cluster and on Bitbucket-provided infrastructure.

These are just a few examples of the many companies that are using Tekton. With its growing popularity, more and more companies are likely to adopt Tekton as a standard tool for automating their CI/CD on Kubernetes.

Its growing popularity is in part because of the flexibility it provides, and how easy it is to use and customize, making it a good fit for companies of all sizes and industries, who are looking for a cloud-native, open-source solution to automate their CI/CD process on kubernetes.

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