Tekton
By the Continuous Delivery Foundation
Tekton is an open-source, Kubernetes-native framework for building CI/CD pipelines, where every pipeline step runs as a container inside a Kubernetes pod rather than on a dedicated CI server. It defines pipelines through Kubernetes custom…
Definition
Tekton is an open-source, Kubernetes-native framework for building CI/CD pipelines, where every pipeline step runs as a container inside a Kubernetes pod rather than on a dedicated CI server. It defines pipelines through Kubernetes custom resources, letting teams build, test, and deploy software using the same cluster, tooling, and scaling model they already use to run their applications, without standing up a separate dedicated CI server.
Overview
Tekton originated from Google's internal pipeline tooling and was contributed to the open-source community, eventually becoming a project under the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Its founding idea was that CI/CD should not require a separate, specially provisioned system distinct from the Kubernetes clusters where applications already run; instead, pipeline execution should be just another kind of workload scheduled by Kubernetes itself. That framing let CI/CD infrastructure inherit the reliability, access control, and scaling properties platform teams had already built for their production clusters, rather than duplicating that work for a parallel build system. Mechanically, Tekton extends Kubernetes with custom resource definitions such as Task, Pipeline, and PipelineRun. A Task defines a sequence of steps, each executed in its own container within a single pod, and a Pipeline chains multiple Tasks together with defined ordering and data passing between them. When a PipelineRun is created, the Kubernetes control plane schedules the resulting pods like any other workload, meaning pipeline execution inherits Kubernetes' own scheduling, resource limits, and namespace isolation without Tekton needing to reimplement any of that infrastructure. This architecture sets Tekton apart from CI platforms like Jenkins or GoCD, which run their own dedicated agent processes outside of Kubernetes' native scheduling. It also differs from higher-level tools like Argo Workflows in scope: Tekton focuses specifically on defining reusable, composable CI/CD building blocks, and many higher-level platforms, including some vendor CI products, are built on top of Tekton as their execution engine rather than competing with it directly. In practice, platform engineering teams use Tekton to build custom internal CI/CD systems tailored to their organization's needs, reusing shared Task definitions across many pipelines through the Tekton Hub catalog of prebuilt tasks. It is common in organizations that are already deeply invested in Kubernetes and want their build and deployment infrastructure to follow the same operational model, tooling, and access controls as their production workloads. The trade-off is that Tekton is a low-level framework rather than a complete, opinionated CI/CD product: teams typically need to build additional tooling, such as a triggering system, dashboard, or higher-level pipeline abstraction, to get a full developer experience comparable to something like GitLab CI or CircleCI out of the box. Organizations without an existing Kubernetes footprint or without platform engineering resources to build on top of Tekton often find a managed CI/CD service simpler to adopt. Tekton pays off most clearly at organizations with the platform engineering capacity to invest that effort once and reuse it across many teams.
Key Features
- Pipelines defined as native Kubernetes custom resources
- Task and Pipeline abstractions for composable, reusable pipeline steps
- Each pipeline step runs as a container within a scheduled pod
- Inherits Kubernetes scheduling, resource limits, and namespace isolation
- Tekton Hub catalog provides prebuilt, shareable Task definitions
- Serves as an underlying execution engine for higher-level CI/CD tools
- Supports event-driven pipeline triggering via Tekton Triggers