Building Cloud-Native CI/CD Workflows with Tekton Pipelines

Setting up an efficient and scalable CI/CD system on Kubernetes can often require piecing together complex integrations. Tekton Pipelines simplifies this process by providing a cloud-native framework that runs directly on your cluster.

What is Tekton Pipelines?

Tekton Pipelines is a Kubernetes extension that installs and runs on your Kubernetes cluster. It defines a set of Kubernetes Custom Resources that act as building blocks from which you can assemble CI/CD pipelines. This native integration means your continuous integration and continuous delivery processes run as standard pods and containers, leveraging the full orchestration power of Kubernetes. Furthermore, Tekton is open-source and part of the CD Foundation.

The primary building block in Tekton is the Task. A Task is a collection of Steps that you define and arrange in a specific order of execution as part of your continuous integration flow. A Task executes as a Pod on your Kubernetes cluster. Each step inside the task corresponds to a container that performs a specific operation, such as cloning a repository, running tests, or building a Docker image.

Installing Tekton Pipelines

Before installing, ensure you have a Kubernetes cluster running version 1.28 or later and the kubectl CLI configured with cluster-admin privileges.

To install Tekton Pipelines on a Kubernetes cluster, run the following command to apply the latest official release directly from the Tekton infrastructure:

Once the installation completes, the Tekton controllers and webhooks will be running in the tekton-pipelines namespace. You can verify the components are ready by checking the pods in that namespace.

Creating Your First Task

To start using Tekton, you can define a custom task that executes a specific action. Tekton allows you to run shell scripts directly inside your container steps without needing to pre-bake them into the image. A step can specify a script field, which contains the body of a script. That script is invoked as if it were stored inside the container image, allowing for flexible, inline script execution.

Here is an example of defining a step that runs a simple Bash script using an Ubuntu image:

To run this task, you would typically wrap these steps into a Task custom resource and then trigger its execution by creating a TaskRun. The TaskRun resource binds your Task to a specific runtime execution context, provisioning a Pod to run the defined containers in sequential order. You can observe the results by inspecting the logs of the deployed Pod.

Structuring Complex Pipelines

As your requirements grow, you can chain multiple tasks together into a Pipeline. A Pipeline resource allows you to define dependencies between tasks, pass data artifacts (like compiled binaries or container image digests) via Workspaces, and execute tasks in parallel when possible.

By treating CI/CD entities as typed Kubernetes resources, Tekton Pipelines allows development teams to manage their automation workflows using the same GitOps and infrastructure-as-code practices they use for deploying applications.